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Book TT'ALS' 



Copyright N° 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Cf)e ;$teti)otust pulpit 



The Living Word 




Riv. A. H. Tittle, 1 ). I). 



The Living Word 



By 

REV. A. H. TUTTLE, D. D. 



\ 



CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND PYE 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 






LIBRARY of CONGRESsf 
Two Copies Received 

JAN 2 1904 

Copyright Entry 
CLASS ; Rj- XXc, No. 
' COPY S 



COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY 
JENNINGS AND PYE 



FOREWORD 
ff 

These sermons are published almost precisely 
as they were preached extemporaneously. After 
making a few syntactical corrections, they are 
given to the merciless accuracy of the type. 

Every sermon had a specific and local purpose, 
which determined its form ; and they all bear the 
marks of hasty preparation, inseparable from a busy 
pastorate. Whatever may be said of their thought- 
forms — such as analyses, language, and illustra- 
tions — the material and spirit were undoubtedly 
absorbed from contact with books and kindred 
minds, and so inwrought into the preacher's own 
as to make it impossible for him to discriminate 
and say, "This is mine," and "That is thine." 
But what , matters it, when our supreme aim is to 
gather from every possible source that which is 
his "Who of God is made unto us wisdom and 
righteousness and sanctification and redemption?" 
Praying that the same Spirit which accompanied 
the spoken word may -breathe in that which is 
written, we send it out into "the ever-living, ever- 
working universe," where it will go beyond the 
power of recall. 

5 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. The Living Word, i Pet. i, 25, - 9 

II. Warring Nature. Isa. xi, 6, 31 

III. He Died for Me. i Thess. v, 9, 10, 48 

IV. The Blessedness oe Pardon. 

Psa. xxxii, 1, 2, - - - 72 

V. Liee by Faith. John v, 24, - 87 

VI. The Inward Reai,. Rom. ii, 28, 29, 102 

VII. Unachieved Ideals. 2 Tim. iv, 20, 120 

VIII. The Church at Ephesus. 

Rev. ii, 1-5, 135 



I. 

THE LIVING WORD. 

"But the word of the Lord endureth forever; and 
this is the word which by the gospel is preached 
unto you/' — I Peter i, 25. 

A word is the expression of a thought. That 
is the chief use of words, to carry ideas. So the 
word of the Lord is God's thought put in language. 

God has more than one way of giving us his 
thoughts. His works reveal them. His providences, 
his Holy Spirit, his Son, all are revelators of the 
Divine mind. But in order to definiteness of thought, 
speech is required. It is a necessity of our infirmi- 
ties. We must speak in words, else what we call 
our thoughts are only vague impressions, which are 
apt to evaporate in feelings. So God gives us 
definite conceptions of his great thought by cast- 
ing it in the form of speech : "Thus saith the Lord." 
But we can readily understand how that a living 
word takes coloring from a locality. The same word 

9 



io The Living Word. 

spoken at widely-separated places will carry ideas 
very unlike. The same is true as to time. A sen- 
tence spoken a hundred years ago will not neces- 
sarily convey the same meaning as spoken now. 
Such is the effect of time and place on a living 
tongue. 

If, then, God is to give us his word unchange- 
able, which will carry his thought uncorrupted 
everywhere and on to the end of time, he must give 
us a literature unique. It must be the product of 
life; that is, the natural outgrowth and expression 
of the thought and life of the people. Then, be- 
fore it has lost its life, it must take inflexible, irre- 
fragable form. That is equivalent to saying that 
God's revelation must be not only a historic, but also 
a linguistic miracle. And that is the miracle of this 
worded thought of God, the Bible. For in the sense 
that he has purposely thrown his thought into it, the 
Bible is "the Word of the Lord." 

Let us at this time consider the two things named 
in our text: the first relating to the form of God's 
Word, the speech in which it is cast ; and the second 
relating to its substance, "the gospel which is 
preached unto you," studying them more especially 
in their bearing on its perpetuity: "It endureth 
forever." 



The: Living Word. ii 

I. The unchangeable preservation off God's 
Word in the world is conserved by the remark- 
able history of the tongues in which he has placed 
his saving truth. 

The relation of the verbal forms of the Bible to 
the providential unfolding of the gospel, and its 
incorruptible continuance in an ever-changing hu- 
man history, is often remarked by Biblical scholars. 
We, however, know of no attempt to state the fact 
in popular form. But it is a fact so vital to faith, 
and so magnifies the wisdom of God in the making 
of his revelation, that we venture to gather, from 
the archives of the learned, four facts for those who 
are not familiar with the original languages of the 
Scriptures. 

i. The Hebrew in which the Old Testament is 
written was the natural language of revelation in 
the time of the infancy and childhood of God's 
people, while he was instructing them in the first 
principles of salvation; but would prove utterly in- 
adequate for them in the time of their maturity. 
It was certainly not the original speech of the hu- 
man race, as has been popularly supposed, but was 
the Shemitic dialect of the Palestinian seaboard. It 
arose from the meeting and attrition of the various 
Shemitic invasions, Babylonian, Aramaic, and Ara- 



12 The: Living Word. 

bic. It was spoken by all the peoples of the coast, 
Phenician, Philistine, Canaanite, and Israelite, each 
nation having its patois, but not so variant as to 
make intercourse with each other difficult. Before 
it had hardened into the artificial product of reflec- 
tion and scholastic effort, the Israelites received it 
and made it palpitate with their own fresh life and 
thought. Doubtless other tongues could have been 
so used; but it was this, the latest and the least 

characteristic of the Shemitic dialects, that was em- 

* 

ployed, while it was yet in its forming stage, to 
take the impression of God's truth. To borrow 
Dr. Palmer's figure, "While the pigments were stfll 
damp, Divine revelation was laid on the surface of 
each word." 

There could be no tongue better fitted to image 
ideas when thought was forming. Its words are 
taken from familiar things, to picture and suggest 
the otherwise unfamiliar. An eminent Hebraist 
has described the Hebrew dictionary as "a splendid 
picture-gallery, upon whose walls are hung the most 
beautiful paintings. Into the tapestry of the lan- 
guage are woven forms of exquisite grace and land- 
scapes of surpassing loveliness." To illustrate, 
would you find a word to mean and suggest power, 
the Hebrew gives you horn or hand, only pictures 



The Living Word. 13 

of power, they being the instruments of strength 
in the ox and the man. So the word that means 
happiness is sunshine. How suggestive! Justice is 
cut or divide, the word being taken from the habit 
of the hunters, after the hunt, of dividing the fruits 
of the chase in strictest impartiality. Adam means 
red clay, describing the material out of which he 
was formed. The word to designate spirit is breath. 
Thus the atmosphere of the Hebrew speech is that 
of the kindergarten. And it was after the methods 
of that school that God trained his people in the sub- 
lime doctrines of his holiness. 

Walker, in his remarkable work on "The Phi- 
losophy of the Plan of Salvation," has well illus- 
trated for us how that, if God would unfold a plan 
of salvation for guilty men, he must employ terms 
that denote general conceptions ; such as sin, redemp- 
tion, repentance, regeneration, and holiness. But 
these terms are utterly without significance until 
the true spiritual import has been put into them. 
Hence God began and carried on an education proc- 
ess. By taking up certain suggestive symbols and 
ceremonies, through them he created the idea; and 
then fastened the idea to some suggestive word, and 
passed it down the ages. The picturesque speech 
which God employed was perfectly adapted to his 



14 The Living Word. 

purpose as he trained his elect people in the princi- 
ples of redemption. While the clay was yet soft, he 
impressed upon it the stamp of his ideas, and it be- 
came the depository of the sacred oracles. Then, 
just when the ceremonial method of instruction had 
achieved its purpose, and the Hebrew speech was 
rich with Divine truth, by a series of historical 
events which we can not but regard as providential, 
it ceased to be used in common intercourse. The 
clay became hard, holding the impression of God's 
mind. 

It may be true, as Professor T. C. Murray af- 
firms, that we do not have the sacred literature of 
the Jews in its original form, but that certain post- 
exilic scholars fashioned the oldest and most recent 
documents into precisely similar grammatical and 
literary shape. But neither this nor any other crit- 
ical handling has altered, nor can alter, its essentially 
Divine character. Like the transparent amber, it 
holds, unchanged and in perfect clearness, that which 
God placed within it. 

2. In the meanwhile another language was form- 
ing, requiring ages for its perfection, and by a proc- 
ess of culture which was impossible for the He- 
brews while they were training in holiness ; a lan- 
guage which was not so well fitted to express the 



The Living Word. 15 

thought of the world's childhood, but which its 
manhood would require. 

That wonderful Greek nation has wonderfully 
enriched the world with its art, its philosophy, its 
literature; but its most valuable gift to men is its 
language. Confessedly it has never been equaled. 
"In the fullness of its vocabulary, in the variety of its 
connective particles, in the richness of its gram- 
matical forms, and, above all, in its power of com- 
bining words as thought seeks emphasis of expres- 
sion, the Greek language stands as the prince of 
tongues. " Dr. Harman, of Dickinson College, 
himself a master of the tongue, used often to 
cry out in his enthusiasm, "Greek is spoken in 
heaven." However that may be, it was the domi- 
nant language in the fullness of time predicted by 
the prophets. Into this tongue God poured the rich 
treasures of his truth, which had been imaged in 
the old economy, but which here found direct ex- 
pression. 

Can we say that it was a mere coincidence that, 
just when the Gospel was ready for its final state- 
ment, there was the perfect speech to receive it? 
Then there is another coincidence to explain : that 
this speech which never could have come to such per- 
fection, except within the limits of a very narrow 



1 6 The Living Word. 

territory, should just at that time be the literary 
speech of the world. At that time, if any one would 
tell his story to all nations, he must tell it in Greek. 
Explain this triple coincidence, where the prophet 
and the historian stand so close together. As sure 
as there is a dominating purpose running with sov- 
ereign might through all history, all this was of 
God, who was preparing his gospel for the world. 

3. And now I reach a point which I have been 
steadily approaching, and where I wish to throw 
especial emphasis. It is a most marvelous fact and 
one so necessary to the preservation of God's 
thought in speech, that I can not look upon it as 
otherwise than a part of the Divine plan. Almost 
immediately after these tongues had become en- 
riched by God's revelation, they ceased to exist as 
living languages. 

We can readily see the force of this fact. We 
know how that all living languages are in a state 
of change. Words do not retain the meanings they 
once had. Some get degraded ; others take a differ- 
ent shade of thought ; others become obsolete ; others 
come to mean the exact opposite of their original 
meanings. 

We have an illustration in our own -English. 
The language has so changed as that we can not 



The Living Word. 17 

read the ancient English classics without the aid of 
a glossary. Suppose that your only access to God's 
thought was in Wydifs Bible ! You could hardly 
read it. Even if you could, your very reading would 
degrade your view of the Divine testimonies, and 
would require constant explanations. Think of 
reading "Jacob had twelve brats, among whom was 
Joseph." Think of Elisha, in that sublime hour 
when Elijah went up in a whirlwind, crying, "My 
dad, my dad, the cart of Israel and the horses of it !" 
In the lapse of half a millennium,, Wyclifs terms 
so full of dignity and beauty when he used them 
to robe God's thought, have become tattered and 
soiled and cast aside for homlier uses. 

The same may be said of Tyndale's and other 
translations. As an example, a later version mak'es 
the great apostle, say, ''Paul, the rascal of God and 
the villain of Jesus Christ." It was a very truthful 
voicing of Paul's thought in that age; for villain 
was an old English word which meant the humblest 
servant, and rascal meant the most needy one of the 
flock. And that is just what Paul would say, that he 
was the most humble of Christ's slaves and the most 
needy. 

The changes that' are constantly occurring in a 
living speech are sure to veil the ancient truth. Only 



1 8 The: Living Word. 

a skillful scholar can lift the curtain and disclose 
the glory of the Lord. Men have long known that 
even our accepted version was obscuring rather than 
revealing many portions of God's truth; and so a 
new version was required. 

It is easy for us to see, then, how that when 
God has once worded his thought, in order to pre- 
serve it in its purity, the word itself must be un- 
changeable. In the most literal sense, "The word of 
the Lord must endure forever." Now, that has been 
done in the passage of these tongues into dead lan- 
guages. When the fire of God's thought heated the 
carbon, lo ! it crystallized into a hard, fixed diamond, 
which flashes forever the light of the altar and the 
throne. To borrow the strong speech of an eminent 
linguist : 

"God has stamped the likeness of his own un- 
changeableness upon the record of his own pur- 
poses and thoughts. Men may deny or refuse, or 
misconstrue, his testimony ; but they can not add to 
it, nor take from it. God has locked up the record 
in the archives of his own providing, and has taken 
the key into his own possession." 

Thus it has come to pass that while other tradi- 
tions, which at their time commanded great atten- 
tion in the world, have become completely eroded 



The Living Word. 19 

by the surges of time, the Word of the Lord stands 
like the rock of ages, bearing aloft the Gospel. 

4. Another fact should be stated in this connec- 
tion, though the purpose of our meditation forbids 
its discussion : I mean the providential preservation 
of the sacred text through the mutations of time. 

Recall the frequent and persistent and venomous 
persecutions which those who cherished the Bible 
have suffered. What people ever drank such a cup 
of woe as those who held in their memories and 
their hearts the heavenly oracles ! They have been 
enslaved, tortured, slain. Their books have been 
burned, and the bodies of their slain rabbis cast 
in the ditch. Thus men thought to obliterate "the 
pestiferous literature." But still they lived, and 
with them the memory of their Holy Book. It is 
a miracle of the ages — a continuous crucifixion and 
a continuous resurrection. 

Akin to this was the early persecution of the 
Christians. For three centuries, with brief inter- 
missions, the Christian Church held the documents 
of their hope against appalling perils ; and thou- 
sands of them sealed their faith with their blood. 
But through it all, the Word continued to abide. 
Recall the long ages of dank ignorance and super- 
stition, in which the Book lay neglected. What oc- 



20 The Living Word. 

curred in the times of Teschendorf, who discovered 
the monks of Sinai kindling an evening fire with the 
precious leaves of the Codex Sinaiticus, was for 
many ages a common occurrence. The wonder is 
that all traces of the written Word had not been ob- 
literated. But here it is, with documentary and his- 
torical proofs sufficient to convince the Christian 
scholar that no fragment of the Word of the Lord is 
lost. Out of the flames it abideth. Recall the efforts 
of many ages to pervert the Word. Unable to oblit- 
erate the record or shake our faith in its genuine- 
ness and authenticity, men have sought to corrupt 
it. They would make it out a fable or a myth. With 
critical acumen, they would confuse our minds with 
questions of history and literature, and so create for 
it an atmosphere as unlike its own as that of the 
factory is unlike that of the garden. But notwith- 
standing all this, the human heart, in its best hours, 
hears here not the rattle of intellectual machinery, 
but the voice of the Lord God, which speaks to us 
with an authority that is entirely independent of all 
critical scholarship. The Scriptures, like Eden's gar- 
den, pour fourth four streams to water and refresh 
all the earth. In the face of nearly every natural rea- 
son for its obliteration, the Word of the Lord abid- 
eth. It is a supernatural Book, having a super- 



The: Living Word. 21 

natural history, and accomplishing supernatural re- 
sults in every heart that receives it. 

II. The: substance: of God's Word. 

Thus far I have spoken only of the form of God's 
Word. However important that may be, its chief 
value is its substance, the truth it embodies. And 
that, according to Peter, is "the gospel which is 
preached unto you." 

1. What the apostle here affirms is, that the gos- 
pel is not a new thing in the world, but the one great 
thought that God had from the first. It is not 
merely the utterance of the New Testament, but is 
voiced in the Old. It is the theme of the entire 
Book. Peter makes a large quotation from Isaiah 
lx, which is a clear prediction of the coming of the 
Messiah and the accomplishment of his great work. 
In the very first chapter of his epistle, he recognizes 
the substance of all prophecy to be our salvation in 
Christ: "Of which salvation the prophets have in- 
quired and searched diligently, who prophesied of 
the grace that should come unto you: searching 
what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ 
which was in them did signify, when it testified be- 
forehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that 
should follow. Unto whom it was revealed, that 



22 The Living Word. 

not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister 
the things, which are now reported unto you by 
them that have preached the gospel unto you with 
the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which 
things the angels desire to look into. Wherefore 
gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, arid hope 
to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto 
you at the revelation of Jesus Christ." (i Peter 
i, 10-13.) 

The one supreme idea carried on God's speech is 
redemption. It was in God's mind from the begin- 
ning. For reasons that are evident, its unfolding 
has been gradual and progressive; yet from eter- 
nity the thought has been unchangeable. "The Fa- 
ther of our Lord Jesus Christ has chosen us in him 
from before the foundation of the world." 

There never was a time in all the past, when the 
Gospel was not mapped out definitely in the mind 
of God, as the plan of a cathedral is wrought in the 
mind of the architect before the first stone is laid; 
and there never will be an instant in the undevel- 
oped future when it will be changed. Every epoch 
in history has been found to be in perfect con- 
formity with the original draft. And when at last 
the headstone is brought with shoutings, "Grace, 
grace be unto it !" new as it may seem to those who 



The Living Word. 23 

have not the vision of the eternal, in every detail, it 
is only the old, old thought with which Eternal 
Love began the redemption scheme. The New Jeru- 
salem coming down from heaven is the old city of 
God. 

2. Another reason that Peter gives for the ever- 
lasting perpetuity of the Word is, it is a seminal 
principle, and has the power of self-propagation. 

He speaks of those to whom he writes as being 
"born again, not of corruptible seed, but of the word 
of the Lord, that liveth and abideth forever." And 
this is in perfect accord with the teaching of the 
Book throughout. Paul calls it "the word of life." 
(Phil, ii, 16.) James says, "Of his own will begat 
he us with the word of truth." (James i, 18.) 
It was on the word that .the dying Savior relied for 
the sanctification of his people. "Sanctify them 
through thy truth : thy word is truth." (John xvii, 
17.) He said of his own utterance, "The words 
that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are 
life." (John vi, 63.) 

Augustine says that what Jesus meant by 
this statement was, that he taught spiritual 
truth in distinction from historical or sci- 
entific truth. But' there is certainly a larger 
meaning than that in this strong utterance. He 



24 The: Living Word. 

makes his words not merely the carriers of spiritual 
truths, but they bear somewhat of the very spirit 
that created them. Otherwise he would have said, 
"My words are spiritual;" but he says, "My words 
are Spirit" and "It is the Spirit that giveth life." 
This carries our mind back to that creative act by 
which man became a living soul. "And God 
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." I do 
not alter its sense, but rather unfold it when I 
read it, "And God breathed into his nostrils the 
Spirit, which giveth life." The Creator projected 
his own Spirit into the highest creature, and it 
walked forth in the image of God, no longer it, but 
he; not simply the crown of creation, but the off- 
spring of God, a son. Now, what Moses affirms 
of the breath of God, Jesus affirms of his words^ 
"They are Spirit." They carry the might of his 
own personal self into the receptive heart. 

Mystery indeed is that power by which one 
spirit can project itself into another; but it is a com- 
mon fact of daily life. See that fever-troubled child, 
rocked in the arms of its mother, who softly sings 

the lullaby: 

" Mother sings thy cradle song, 
And the angels hither throng, 
While the stars gleam overhead, 
Watching round thy humble bed 

Lullaby, lullaby, 

Sing lullaby." 



The Living Word. 25 

A great restfulness enwraps the child, like the gath- 
ering shades of evening. He sleeps. What was it 
that calmed the child? Superficially, the lullaby; 
but more truly the great calm of the mother heart. 
She projected, through her song, her own very life 
into the heart of her child. Thus by the might of 
that ascendency which a nobler mind exerts over 
those of weaker mold, one of positive commanding 
character can, and does, cast his own thought, peace, 
joy, will, into the inner life of others. They live 
by his life. And one of the chief conduits of this 
flow of life from one to another is speech. Words 
are the forces of life. Thus when Jesus speaks, he 
not only gives us his thought, but he projects some- 
what of himself to the heart that receives it. Who- 
ever believes the words of Jesus, appropriates and 
assimilates them, really inhales the life of God, and, 
like the first man, becomes "a living soul." 

What we have said of the Word of Jesus, is true 
of the entire Scriptures. We live by "every word 
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Here 
we have not only what God spoke in former days, 
but what he would say to us now. There is this su- 
pernaturalness about this Book : it has the power 
of a personal presence and a direct personal ad- 
dress. It picks us out from all others, and speaks 



26 Thk Living Word. 

to us in such a way as to force the conviction that 
it means me. It speaks to us as Jesus spoke to 
the woman at the well, telling us "all things what- 
soever I did." It rebukes, approves, alarms, en- 
courages, according to our personal need. 

Notice the force of these words in controversy. 
They silence argument, not by an appeal to the in- 
tellect, but by an address to the inward sense, which, 
by force of its intuitive assent, compels the intellect. 
The godly but illiterate man will confound the skep- 
tic just by quoting the inspired words. Notice their 
power, when aptly quoted, to soothe the suffering 
heart, like the touch of a loving hand. Their power 
is even more effective when read directly from the 
sacred page; for it is theri, not merely a message, 
but is immediately from the "mouth of the Lord." 

Notice how marvelously fruitful they are. Every 
time we turn to them, they are fresh. After deep 
experiences, they are richer and fuller of meanings 
than when they first came to our hearts. They out- 
run our swiftest speed. They are inexhaustible. 
Volumes of sermons may be preached from a sin- 
gle text. The wisest sages, the holiest saints, here 
have their feet only in the surf, while the billows 
roll away off into the infinities. 

Notice their saving power. Have you ever 



The Living Word. 27 

struggled in vain to guide an inquiring spirit, and 
then, after an earnest prayer, just echoed some of 
these God-spoken words ? What a miraculous effect 
has been produced! Did you ever know a soul 
profoundly awakened who had not been roused by 
something from the Book? Did you ever know 
of a soul converted, that had not been especially 
aided by Scripture language? These words have 
a Divine power to quicken. They awaken heavenly 
ideals. They have a grappling affinity for all the 
moralities in domestic and political and social life. 
I would not idolize the letter; yet there is a 
nameless power in the sentence that follows, "Thus 
saith the Lord." The secret of it is God is in it. 
Just as truly as you put yourself in your speech, 
God is in his Word. Hence "it endureth forever." 
We have no need to become alarmed over the at- 
tempts of men in these days to destroy this Word. 
That has been the effort of untruth in all the ages. 
But still it is here with the breath of eternity, speak- 
ing out as triumphantly as ever "the Gospel." Men 
have thought to hush this Word, and lay it away 
in a sepulcher sealed and guarded. But on the morn- 
ing of the third day, forth it comes with the cry, 
"All power is given unto me in heaven and in 
earth." 



28 The Living Word. 

III. The: practical lessons to draw from these 

facts are : 

i. Feed your own life with the Word. We 
greatly bemoan our weakly religious life. There 
are so many of us who are lacking in bone and 
muscle. We impress men with the fact that we are 
good and weak. Our religion runs into emotion, 
sentiment, and is wanting in manly power. That 
can be remedied by better feeding. Here is the 
true food : "Every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God." Make the Scriptures your own. 
Learn what they mean. Get their parts. Then link 
them together. Become master of the one great 
thought of the Book, — God's redemption in Christ, 
the Gospel. That will make us not only strong, but 
evergreen — "trees planted by the rivers of water, 
whose leaf also shall not wither." 

2. Preach the Word, (i Tim. iv, 2.) We are 
living in a time when this injunction of the apostle 
is especially needed. It is a time of strong reaction 
from the meditative and devotional spirit which 
characterized other ages. Not holiness, but useful- 
ness, is the watchword. Our aspiration is not so 
much to be as to do. The ideal Christian is not 
the prophet, coming with face aglow from the 
Mount of God, but the armored soldier on the gory 



The Living Word. 29 

field. The factory is taking the place of the altar. 
Organization is supplanting inspiration. There 
never was a time when enterprises of religious ac- 
tivity were so multiform as to-day. Societies, asso- 
ciations, unions, federations, leagues, asylums, hos- 
pitals, missions, are multiplied, divided and subdi- 
vided, belted and manned, ad infinitum. O ! Wheels ! 
The voice of praise is dulled in the rattle of ma- 
chinery. The incense of prayer is lost in the smoke 
of the factory. What we dread is not the fact that 
these many forms of Christian work exist. They 
all had their spring in the love of Christ, and are 
helping to make the burden of life bearable. What 
we dread is the false ideal which this fact is cre- 
ating ; namely, that the useful rather than the de- 
vout man is the typical Christian. It reverses the 
Divine order, and, unless there is a speedy retro- 
action will result in an utter secularizing of piety. 
We are not created by good works into Jesus Christ, 
but "we are created in Christ Jesus unto good 
works.''' They are the fruit not the root, of the 
Divine life. 

Our remedy for any threatening evil in this 
particular is to keep the garden of the Lord co- 
piously watered with the streams of life, God's 
Word. 



30 The Living Word. 

3. Finally, remember that, in so far as we get the 
Word, we get that which lasts. Everything else 
perishes. "All flesh is as grass, and all the glory 
of men as the flower of the grass. The grass with- 
ereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the 
Word of the Lord endureth forever." 

Does that mean hereafter? Why not? Truth 
existed as a fact in the Divine mind before it was 
spoken, just as the rivers exist in the clouds before 
they pour down the hills ; and as they flow on to the 
ocean, and then are caught up on the arms of light 
back to the sky, so truth, dropping from the lips 
of the eternal, flows like rivers of life through time, 
then sweeps round back into God. So taught the 
Oriental mystics. It is only another way of saying 
truth flows from eternity to eternity. O, who would 
not move on this majestic current? It carries us 
up into Him "who was and is, and is to come/' 



II. 

WARRING NATURE. 

"The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the 
leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf 
and the young lion and the fatling together; and 
a little child shall lead them!' — Isa. xi, 6. 

I beueve;, with most of our commentators, that 
the prophet here describes what is actually to occur 
among the beasts of the forest and the field, in the 
time of man's spiritual regeneration. The triumph 
of the Spirit in the world will be shared by all cre- 
ation. As Paul also teaches, all these conflicting 
elements in the natural world, whether animate or 
inanimate, will be brought into perfect peace. "In 
that day there will be nothing to hurt or destroy in 
all my holy mountain." I, however, do no violence 
to the passage, but only follow the example of the 
apostles, and of Jesus himself, in considering it 
as a symbol of what is occurring in our own per- 
sonal life by the power of the gentle Christ. And 
this spiritual fact is only the prelude of the natural. 

3i 



32 The: Living Word. 

I. The: convict within. 

i. Every man finds all these animals in himself: 
The snarling wolf, the blood-thirsty leopard, the 
ravenous lion ; beasts with fangs and claws ; crawl- 
ing, stinging, and hissing things; every ugly brute 
in the world, — all are here in us, a part of our 
nature. On the other hand, all the kindly animals 
are here : the gentle lamb, the timid kid, the laborious 
ox. And here, too, are the humming bee, the cooing 
dove, and the celestial nightingale. 

2. These elements do not harmonize. We can- 
not make these animals live together in peace. The 
wolf hunts the lamb; the leopard thirsts for the 
blood of the kid; the lion rends the ox; the ser- 
pent charms the bird to its death. This is bad 
enough in the animal world, where every brute has 
its natural protection; but when it all occurs right 
here in our own breast, where we are both the de- 
vourer and the devoured, it is torment indescribable. 

We have seen a man with a loving heart, tear- 
ing his hair because he had done a hateful thing 
to the one he most loved. We have seen a gener- 
ous man crawling away in selfish greed. We have 
seen a truthful man smarting under the scourge 
of his own lie. We have seen men rushing into 
shameful excesses which they loathed. 



Warring Nature. 33 

3. This anomalous fact has its powerful repre- 
sentation in literature. Hawthorne impersonates 
Egotism as poor Roderick Elliston carrying in his 
bosom an enormous green reptile, with an ice-cold 
length of body, and the deadliest poison in his sting. 
It ate into and absorbed his very being. It stung 
him when he thought of a brother's excellence, and 
gave him pleasure when calamity overtook a friend. 
It awakened a preternatural insight into others' 
defects, which he delighted to expose. It turned 
his face into a sickly green, mingling with his 
natural deadly white. It put poison into his breath, 
and turned his speech into a revolting hiss. He 
was a crawling, shuddering thing. That was bad 
enough ; but what made it worse was, that, wedded 
to this repulsive thing, was sweet love. One might 
be content to be just a serpent; but to be both a 
serpent and a dove, is to< writhe in the Inferno of 
contention. 

Stevenson's "Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and 
Mr. Hyde" is not so strange to us, for the two men 
of diverse characters are both present in us, joined 
in a mystery of one personality. With far more 
searching insight than Stevenson does Edgar Allan 
Poe represent this same antagonism in "William 
Willson," who was constantly encountering a gen- 
3 



34 The Living Word. 

tier man of the same name, and with a manner and 
voice which were wondrously like his own, yet as 
unlike as sanctity is unlike depravity. This name- 
sake dogged his steps, thwarted his purposes, dashed 
the evil cup from his lips, and intruded upon every 
critical hour with an uplifted finger of warning. 
Tormented by this impertinent intrusion, William, 
on one occasion, drew his rapier and thrust his gen- 
tle double through and through. The dying man 
uttered these awful words : "Henceforth art thou 
also dead — dead to the world, to heaven, and to 
hope! In me didst thou exist; and in my death, 
see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly 
thoa hast murdered thyself/' All of which is in 
full accord with Paul's powerful picture of the moral 
perversion and degeneration of a soul divided against 
itself. 

Dr. W. L. Watkinson tells us of how some mis- 
guided scientists have recently succeeded in pro- 
ducing what he calls a diabolical fad. By grafting 
a portion of one insect on the body of another, they 
have made new organisms in which are conjoined 
beings of directly opposite natures — miserable crea- 
tures, with the clash of irreconcilable impulses, and 
instincts that tear each other ! The doctor imagines 
a spider-butterfly, with "a passion for the sunshine 



Warring Nature. 35 

and a love for darkness, with a longing for roses 
and a thirst for blood, demanding inconsistent satis- 
faction : the creature perplexed within itself, afraid 
of itself, devouring itself." 

Ye: here is that selfsame thing in us. We are 
that spider-butterfly. "The thing that I would,, I 
do not. ... I delight in the law of God after 
the inward man. But I find a law in my members 
warring against the law of the spirit of my mind." 
That is the antagonism. We are in a hopeless strug- 
gle with a monster that cleaves to us. and from 
which we can not extricate ourselves because it is a 
part of ourselves. That is the dreadful "body of 
death'' which Paul pictures, and which we recog- 
nize as our very own. 

4. What is true of oursek'es is true of :: ery one 
else; true of the individual, and true of the collec- 
tive body. We are a race majestic above all things 
eise. so that God himself bends down over us in 
infinite tenderness; yet so out of adjustment with 
ourselves that we can not live in peace with each 
other without armies and navies, and police, and 
locks and bars, and constant watchfulness. "We 
fight and devour one another/"' We have read of 
how some learned Frenchmen once aspired to make 
a fabric of wonderful delicacv. Thev would weave 



36 The Living Word. 

the threads of the spider-web into a cloth softer 
than the down of an angel's wing. They collected 
thousands of spiders, and placed them in a dark 
room, with flies to feed them, and then left them to 
do their weaving. Some weeks later they went to 
note the result; and but one spider was left. They 
had fought each other till at last the one spider 
king was sovereign of the lonely realm. 

That is the way we would weave our white 
robes; only, because of the nobler nature in us, we 
foresee the dire result and place defenses about us 
in officers and prisons. To the spider is joined the 
archangel in man. 

II. Peace restored. 

The prophet assures us that the conflict will 
cease. "And there shall come forth a rod out of the 
stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his 
roots; and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon 
him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the 
spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge 
and of the fear of the Lord. . . . They shall not 
hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain : for the 
earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as 
the waters cover the sea." 

I. Not by the destruction of the faculties or pas- 



Warring Nature. 37 

sions that have brought us into this distress. That 
is the way by which governments have sometimes 
sought to relieve the country from the ravages of 
wild animals. They offer a price for the heads of 
slain bears, wolves, and other beasts, and thus ex- 
terminate them. It is thought, however, by many 
philosophers, that by that process we eliminate ele- 
ments that are really needed for the health of Na- 
ture. To rid the world of wild animals may be the 
only practicable good at the present time; but it is 
by no means the ideal condition. 

However that may be in the natural world, we 
know that the method of destruction has proven a 
hopeless failure in the realm of spirit. Honest men 
have bravely sought to destroy their base passions 
by desperate methods. What a pathetic story is that 
that is told of the hermits, the Carthusians, the Peni- 
tentes, and others who have sought holiness by the 
torture and ruin of the fleshly appetites ! Such ef- 
forts have been as vain as those of the priests of 
Baal on Carmel, who cut themselves with knives to 
command the attention of their god. The heavenly 
fire does not come by any such methods. It is all a 
failure. By taking themselves out of the world, men 
become the subjects of painful illusions, and brutish 
stupefactions, and insane passions, worse than those 



3$ The Living Word. 

they sought to destroy. The man who, crazed by 
the discovery of the leprous spot on his hand, sev- 
ered it on the buzzing saw, discovered too late that 
he had only removed a symptom, and had not elim- 
inated the poison. It was not simply the hand that 
bore the disease. It streamed in the blood. "The 
leprosy lies deep within/' 

There is not a faculty in us but was originally 
Divine ; and not by its destruction, but by its resto- 
ration to its primal purpose, can peace come to these 
warring appetites. Redemption, not destruction, is 
our nature's law. 

2. Restraint. It is thus that we keep wild ani- 
mals in zoological gardens and menageries. We 
restrain them with fences, caves, iron cages, and 
chains. But who of us, when looking at the mag- 
nificent creatures in the Bronx Gardens, does not 
feel what a pity that we must keep them thus, and 
think how much more beautiful would they be in 
their native freedom ? 

So these wild animals of the soul must be held 
in restraint. "I keep under my body," said Paul. 
He says this not alone of those appetites which we 
call depraved, but of his entire being. He kept 
everything strictly to the one supreme purpose of 
his life, to preach the gospel. 



Warring Nature:. 39 

So every part of our being must be brought 
sternly into subjection to the law of right; not alone 
those that we ordinarily call bad — such as temper, 
sloth, impatience, greed — but those that look to- 
ward the holy. Even the so-called good may run 
wild. In the natural world, domestic dogs, fowls, 
horses, if left to do as they please, will become a 
nuisance to us, and will themselves soon degener- 
ate. So of our virtues : they need to be cultivated, 
sometimes stimulated, oftentimes restrained, always 
kept within the bounds of law. "Bringing every 
thought into captivity unto the obedience of Christ. " 
Restraint is not the ideal, but it is better far than 
license. 

3. Restoration. If all that we could say to you 
who are distressed by this anarchy of soul, was, 
that your only hope is either in destruction or 
restraint of the conflicting forces in you, I would 
preach a poor gospel indeed. But there is a better 
way; namely, the Divine renewal of your nature 
by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. 

What broke the harmony of the natural world 
in which God had originally made it, was sin; and 
harmony can be restored only by the removal of that 
sin. Hence our despair. The Ethiopian can not 
change his skin, nor the leopard his spots. We 



40 The Living Word. 

may try education; but we have learned that edu- 
cation, so far from washing our guilt away, often- 
times only inflames it. We may try refinement ; but 
that is trying to restore the broken harp by varnish- 
ing its strings. We may try courts and prisons; 
but, alas! they restrain, without curing crime. 

After all that has been suggested by the world 
to remove the prevalent distress, this is the cry of 
the awakened heart, "Behold I was conceived in sin 
and shapen in iniquity." Into our despair comes a 
Savior. Jesus saves us from our sin. This he does 
by cleansing out its virus, and imparting the Divine 
element of life. Both are essential for our re- 
covery. 

(a) Cleansing. Mysterious indeed, both in ori- 
gin and in character, is this dreadful thing that has 
come into human history, we call sin. In our meta- 
physics we are divided into three schools. One 
teaches that sin is an evil projected into us from 
without, as fever-germs are taken into the blood by 
what we eat and drink and breathe. A second 
school declares that sin is simply the natural pro- 
cess of decay that follows the withdrawal of life. A 
third would have us believe that it is not an evil 
at all, but a part of the mysterious process of the 
evolution of a soul on its way to perfection. This 



Warring Nature. 41 

third view is revolting to us who sit at the feet of 
prophets and apostles to learn the truth as it is in 
Jesus. It is shocking for us to hear that "the brothel 
and the saloon are steps heavenward ;" that "pro- 
fanity and obscenity are the groans of travail rather 
than death;" that falsehood and theft and greed 
are "virtues in disguise." Moreover, our observa- 
tion is that no people have ever risen from a lower 
to a higher character except when influenced by a 
loftier force from without. Until apprehended from 
above, the human course has ever been downward. 
"The seeds of sin grow up for death/' 

As to the other schools we have named, we have 
no contention with them. However sin came, it is 
unclean. The filthy microbes that fever and devour 
the heart are these : "Evil thoughts, adulteries, for- 
nications, murders, thefts, covetousness, lascivious- 
ness, wickedness, deceit, an evil eye, blasphemy, 
pride, foolishness." What a brood of foul and vi- 
cious things is this that comes trooping from the 
dark caverns of the human heart! Xo washing of 
the parched lips or bathing of the hot brow can 
cleanse this breeding-place of all iniquity, or quench 
the hot flame of this Gehenna of the heart, "where 
the worm dieth not. and the fire is not quenched." 

" Xo outward forms can make us clean, 
The leprosy lies deep Yathin." 



42 The Living Word. 

The Hebrew intuition, trained as it was in the doc- 
trine of sin, clearly perceived this feature of the 
filthiness of sin. Hence its frequent symbolic ablu- 
tions. Baptism meant to the Jew, as it does to us, 
the washing of guilt from the soul. Paul's vivid 
description of the course of sin is supported, not 
only in the history before his time, but in after years 
as well : "Given over to all uncleanness." History 
and our conscience both proclaim that sin is filthi- 
ness. And it has bacteria fecundity, multiplying 
itself with astonishing speed. Some philosopher 
has said that it would take a thousand years to evo- 
lute an English gentleman from a Celtic peasant. 
He could have added that only a few years of phys- 
ical excesses are required to involute an English 
gentleman into an idiotic debauchee. 

Our sin-befouled hearts can be recovered only 
by a thorough cleansing. Happily for us, Christ 
can do it. "He is able to save unto the uttermost." 
He cleanses partly by the word : "Now are ye clean 
through the word I have spoken unto you ;" partly 
by the blood: "The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, 
cleanseth us from all sin;" partly by the Spirit: 
"According to his mercy he saved us, by the wash- 
ing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy 
Ghost." The word, the blood, the Spirit— truth, 



Warring Nature. 43 

love, life — these are the cleansing streams that "wash 
the dismal stains away." 

(b) Importation. Christ not only cleanses the 
sinful heart, — he also restores its lost life : "And 
you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses 
and in sins." 

We do not believe that those who teach that sin 
is the decay which follows the withdrawal of life 
have told the whole story. Nevertheless it is true 
that when a soul is dead in sin, there follow results 
similar to those that come to every other thing that 
has lost its life. The power of the unity of the or- 
ganism is broken, the elements war with each other, 
and dissolution takes place. It is the ancient curse 
of sin, "Unto dust thou shalt return.'' 

What a sad sight is a dead tree which once was 
a thing of beauty, the proud monarch of the plain, 
but now stands lone, leafless, with withered and 
broken branches, holding the foul nest of carrion 
birds ! Sadder still is a human corpse, with its doom 
of "corruption." But what so sad as a soul, des- 
tined by its Creator to unfold imperial powers in the 
infinities and eternities, cleaving to the dust, and 
enslaved by the things it ought to rule ! 

It is not only sad. it is perilous. When other 
things die, that is practically the end of them. In a 



44 The Living Word. 

little while all that they once were, melts away into 
the great All. But a soul continues to live when 
the divine part is withdrawn. It lives while it is 
dead. It seeks through the flesh the gratification of 
an appetite, which only the food from above could 
appease. It bites the dust. But this world "can 
never give the bliss for which we sigh." Hence our 
excesses. In no department of desire does man 
come to a place where he can say, "It is enough/' 
The soul drives the appetites and every faculty far 
beyond the bounds which nature had set for them. 
This unnatural excess must end in ruin. The glut- 
ton is sure, sooner or later, to find himself where 
Dante found his friend Ciacco, in the third circle of 
Inferno, "submerged in sickening mire, filth-be- 
grimed and battered with rain eternal, maledict, and 
cold and heavy." And so of every faculty. Driven 
to unnatural excess by the soul's vast want, it be- 
comes a flood of base desire, and sweeps down to 
hopeless wreck, reason, love, character, and every 
noble thing. O, brothers, why drink at the deadly 
sewers when the streams of living waters are so 



" Weary souls that wander wide 
From the central point of bliss, 
Turn to Jesus crucified ; 

Fly to those dear wounds of his : 
Sink into the purple flood ; 
Rise into the life of God." 



Warring Nature. 45 

4. I have but a few words on the influence of 
man's restoration on nature's disorder, of which our 
text speaks. 

The Scriptures teach that what disturbed the 
order of this natural world was the fall of him 
who had been given dominion over all that God had 
made. "Cursed is the ground for man's sake." 
Whatever may be the cause, it is certainly the fact 
that nature has combated every step of our strug- 
gle for life. Storms, earthquakes, floods, pesti- 
lences, wild beasts, vermin, weeds, and briers have 
impeded our way; and its powers, when captive, 
often break their bonds with destructive violence. 

It is also highly probable that this order of things 
we call Nature is radically changing. Sir William 
Crookes, at a recent congress of chemists in Berlin, 
said that everything is rapidly dissolving and de- 
generating into the original protyle; and that the 
universe is lapsing back to primeval chaos. And in 
this he is supported by the eminent astronomer, Sir 
Norman Lockyer, who, in his spectroscopic studies, 
became convinced that the sun and stars were chang- 
ing from certain chemical elements into others. The 
inference of final dissolution is strongly disputed 
by other chemists; but there can be hardly a ques- 
tion of the ultimate transformation of nature. The 



46 The: Living Word. 

former things are passing away. Nature is hurry- 
ing on to a new heaven and a new earth. Thus the 
most recent science is guessing at what the New 
Testament prophecy clearly proclaims. The Scrip- 
tures furthermore teach that our dominion in nature 
is to be recovered in Christ. Our Lord explains his 
own power by, "I seek not my own, but the will of 
my Father which is in heaven;" and, "The works 
that I do, I do not of myself, but the Father that 
dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." 

And this is true of us all, that as far as we come 
into God's will in reference to his creatures, they 
yield a willing obedience. We are in possession of 
many instances in which wild beasts and birds have 
recognized certain men as their natural protectors, 
and yielded themselves to them in perfect confidence. 
Thomas Hughes names some that have come under 
his own observation, and then refers us to the his- 
toric cases, such as the authority which the hermits 
of the Thebaid had over the wild animals of the 
desert; he refers to Cowper and his hares; Water- 
ton and the birds; Thoreau and the squirrels and 
fish. His explanation is doubtless the true one, that 
all these, unconsciously but still faithfully, followed 
God's mind in their dealings with his creatures, 
and so have stood in true relations to them all. 



Warring Nature. 47 

And what is true of animals, is true of all things 
in the realm of nature. Emerson says, "That as the 
earth was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so 
it ever is to just so much of his attributes as we 
bring to it." An American electrician of note has 
recently said that, if ions can be separated from 
atoms, and re-collected, the manufacture of precious 
metals and even new elements, such as the recent 
radium with its all but supernatural qualities, is 
feasible. All that is needed is to know its law, 
which the Creator has put upon it, and accord with it. 

Then there is no physical reason why the city of 
God with gates of pearl, shall not come down on 
earth. This is what will be when the spirit of Christ 
fills us all. Everything in nature will feel the touch 
of the heavenly fingers, and all discord will cease, 
and the entire material sphere thrill with heaven's 
harmony. "Thy will be done in earth as it is done 
in heaven." 



III. 

HE DIED FOR ME. 

"For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to 
obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ, who 
died for us, that we should live together with 
him." — i Thess. v, 9, 10. 

The: two greatest mysteries of the gospel of our 
salvation, unfathomed and unfathomable by the hu- 
man mind, are the incarnation and the cross. Yet 
these two facts, the personal Divinity of Christ and 
his atoning work, are the chief columns which sup- 
port the dome of our temple. Many a blind Sam- 
son has thrown his giant strength against them, 
but, unlike the house of Dagon, its arches are not 
fallen. Nor do we have any fear of that catastrophe ; 
for they rest on the pillars of eternal truth. Our 
danger, however, is that we who love the gospel 
may come to regard these central verities as vaga- 
ries imported to us from out of the metaphysics of 
ancient cloisters, and altogether inadequate for the 
practical mind of our time. Without open rejection, 

48 



He Died for Ms. 49 

it is possible for us to neglect them, and so come, 
as many do, into a faith in which these cardinal doc- 
trines have entirely disappeared. 

Just so sure as we do that, we have surrendered 
all. Then Christianity has become, as Lerminier 
says, "One of the days of humanity; merely a stage 
in the onward march of the world's progress, which 
can not fail to be followed, sooner or later, by an- 
other.''' To this sage statement Godet adds a warn- 
ing : ''You thereby open the door to that 'other' 
whom the carnal heart of man demands, and whom 
Jesus foretold in these words : 'I am come in the 
name of my Father, and ye receive me not : if an- 
other shall come in his own name, him ye will re- 
ceive.' An ominous saying, pregnant with a dark 
future/'' Because of this constant danger, Jesus 
left us a memorial ordinance, in which these two 
things are kept ever before our minds : "Do this 
in remembrance of me ;" "This is my blood which 
was shed for you.'' That is a fatal hour in the his- 
tory of a soul when it is unable to say, ''He died for 
me." But who speaks it from his heart, even though 
it be with trembling, has already come into life. 
''For God hath appointed him to salvation." 

My purpose in this meditation is not to review 
the many theories of the atonement, nor to express 
4 



50 The; Living Word. 

a preference for any one. This would surely lead 
us into obscurities which would probably darken 
the fact itself, and provoke troubled doubt. The 
secret of the atonement, if ever discovered, will cer- 
tainly not be by intellectual processes, but by the 
spirit's intuitions. "The secret of the Lord is with 
them that fear him. He will show them his cov- 
enant." It is the fact rather than the theory that 
we would have brought to our hearts. And my ob- 
ject is first to state, for those who accept the Bible 
as the guide to their faith, a few things which may 
help to establish the fact in their minds ; and then, 
secondly, to note the bearing of that fact on our 
life : "That we should live together with him." 

I. Christ's death is the God-appointed method 

BY WHICH WE WHO ARE UNDER THE CURSE OE 
DEATH COME INTO THE JOY AND VICTORY OE IJFE. 

Theologians have for many ages described 
Christ's death as a vicarious sacrifice. Notwith- 
standing the fact that the word vicarious does not 
occur in the Scriptures and has a strong theological 
flavor, we retain it in common use because it ex- 
presses with such accuracy the real character of the 
event of Calvary. A vicarious act is an act done 
in another's stead. Thus the Pope of Rome calls 



Hs Died for Me. 51 

himself Christ's vicar, believing, as he does, that 
he is set to act in his place. Thus the vicar or vice- 
roy of a realm is one who acts in the stead of the 
king, and his reign is virtually the reign of the 
king himself. Our physicians speak of vicarious 
organs in the human body, meaning, by them, or- 
gans which do the work others were set to do. 

This certainly is the way in which the death of 
Christ is presented to us by himself: "Even as the 
Son of man came to give his life a ransom for 
many." (Matt, xx, 28.) The word for in this 
passage is the Greek particle anti, "instead of." 
By this, Jesus asserts that his death was not like 
that of a martyr or patriot, who lays down his life 
for his Church or his country. He died not merely 
for the benefit of others, but in their stead. It was 
the one great event which was the supreme purpose 
of his coming, to lay down his life, "a ransom," the 
payment of a redemption price for our life. What- 
ever theory of the atonement we may accept, it will 
be fatally defective unless it includes this one essen- 
tial fact, that the life of guilty souls is secured by 
the death of the innocent One. 

" Our sins on Christ were laid ; 
He bore the inighty load: 
Our ramsom price he fully paid 
In groans and tears and blood." 



52 The: Living Word. 

i. This fact is written on every page of Scrip- 
ture. To eliminate the atonement from the Bible 
would be like drawing the blood from the human 
body, — you have left a lifeless thing. The blood- 
thought streams through every part of the sacred 
Word. 

Away on the frontiers of Bible story we read 
of the acceptable bleeding sacrifice: "And in pro- 
cess of time it came to pass that Cain brought of 
the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. 
And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his 
flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had 
respect unto Abel and to his offering : but unto Cain 
and to his offering he had not respect." (Gen. 

iv, 3-50 

Do we ask why God accepted the offering of Abel 
and rejected that of Cain, we have the answer 
partly in Gen. v, 7: "If thou doest well, shalt thou 
not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth 
at the door." If Cain was sinless, he had nothing 
to fear. But if he was guilty, the offering for his 
sin was the animal that couched at his door. Read 
this passage in connection with that of Heb. xi, 4, 
"By faith Abel offered a more acceptable sacrifice 
than that of Cain," etc., and its meaning is clear. 
Abel's sacrifice was accepted because it was an offer- 



He Died for Me. 53 

ing of faith — faith in the great fact that God had 
announced at the fall; namely, that in the fullness 
of time "the seed of the woman" should, by his own 
suffering, recover the fallen race. Abel's faith 
rested on this divinely-appointed offering; and his 
sacrifice of blood only imaged and anticipated it. 
Cain, on the other hand, would rest his faith on his 
personal achievements. He brought the fruits of his 
toil. Abel and Cain represent the two diverse doc- 
trines of the world and the Church, — recovery by my 
work; recovery by God's gift. In the Bible story 
we find Noah and Abraham and Job, and all the 
patriarchs offering sacrifices in this same faith 
which gave distinctive character to that of Abel ; 
a blood offering anticipating the one which God him- 
self was to make. 

When God gave his people a sacrifice prior to 
their departure from Egypt, it was that of the Pass- 
over, which had, as its chief meaning for the hope- 
ful fugitives, safety under the blood. And when 
he gave his people a nationality, he confirmed what 
was already a fact, and guarded and unfolded more 
fully, in an elaborate ritual, the old-time meaning. 
I need not attempt a detailed review of the Levitical 
sacrifices. In all that historic system three things 
appear : 



54 The Living Word, 

( i ) It all centered in the offerings for sin ; and 
its meaning as a whole was expiation by the blood 
of the offering. When he who brought his gift to 
the altar, stood at last in the outer court of the tem- 
ple and saw the smoke of the sacrifice ascending to 
the heavens, the one thought that filled his heart 
was this : on that altar lie my sins, atoned for by the 
offering. 

(2) A second fact concerning that system was 
that God did not delight in sacrifices for their own 
sake. They were a means to an end. "Hath the 
Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacri- 
fices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord ? Behold, 
to obey is better than sacrifice and to hearken than 
the fat of rams." (1 Sam. xv, 22.) "For thou de- 
sirest not sacrifice; else would I give it; thou de- 
lightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of 
God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite 
heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." (Psa. li, 

A 17.) 

(3) A third fact is, that all the bloody sacrifices 
had their consummation in Jesus: "But if we walk 
in the light," says St. John, "the blood of his Son Je- 
sus Christ cleanseth us from all sin." Ephesians i, 7 : 
"In whom we have redemption through his blood, 
the forgiveness of sins; according to the riches of 



Hs Die:d for Me. 55 

his grace/' Ephesians ii, 13: "But now in Christ 
Jesus, ye, who sometime were afar off, are made 
nigh by the blood of Christ." 1 Peter i, 18, 19 : "Ye 
were not redeemed with corruptible things, but 
with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb with- 
out blemish, and without spot." Rev. i, 5 : "Who 
washed us from our sins in his blood." Rev. v, 9: 
"Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood." Rom. 
v, 9: "Being justified by his blood." Galatians i, 4: 
"Who gave himself for our sins, that he might 
deliver us from this evil world." Hebrews i, 3: 
"When he had by himself purged our sins." 1 
Peter ii, 24 : "Who his own self bare our sins in his 
own body on the tree; that we, being dead to sin, 
should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes 
ye were healed." 1 John iii, 5 : "He was manifested 
to take away our sins." Rev. i, 5 : "Unto him that 
loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own 
blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto 
God." 

I can not conceive how one who takes the Scrip- 
tures for his thought can escape this wondrous 
blood line. It is the chief thing in the patriarchal 
faith ; it is the central idea of the entire temple serv- 
ice which was avowedly symbolic and prophetic ; and 
it is the supreme doctrine of the New Testament. 



56 The; Living Word. 

Thus the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is filled 
with the blood thought, and to take it out is to de- 
stroy the Book itself. It was once my privilege to 
examine for several hours the markings in the Bible 
of one of our most effective evangelists. They were 
made with such intelligence as to open doors into the 
secret chambers of God's thinking, and to lift up 
windows from out of which came the rich music of 
his voice. But of all the many meanings that came 
to me by this inarticulate interpretation, none so 
powerfully impressed me as this fact which I am 
trying to give to you; namely, that the one great 
utterance of the Holy Bible is salvation of guilty 
men by the death of Jesus Christ. This evangelist 
had gone through his Book many times, coloring 
crimson every passage in which mention was made 
of blood with a religious significance. Then wher- 
ever any fact was stated which depended directly 
upon the truth of the blood sacrifices, he underlined 
the leading word with a heavy red line, and con- 
nected it with the central truth by a finer line. It 
is astonishing how crimson those pages were; how 
those lines threaded every part, like arteries and 
veins ; how they all centered in the altar of Calvary ; 
how every truth seemed to be secondary and sub- 
sidiary to this central one — our life by Christ's 



He; Died for Me. 57 

death! Remove the crimson fountain and its 
streams, and you have no Bible left. 

2. The principle of life by death is written on 
every page of nature. There are those who would 
relegate the study of this law of vicarious sacrifice 
to those who delight in metaphysical speculation, 
but believe it unworthy the consideration of those 
who pursue "the scientific method. 7 ' But we have 
only to open our eyes to see this law confronting us 
everywhere in the entire visible world. It is not 
only taught us by authority in the holy sacrament of 
the Lord's Supper, but in every meal. Every article 
of food on your table was once a living thing, and 
is now dead that you may live. I can not refrain 
from quoting Frederick William Robertson's strong 
illustrations of this mysterious and fearful law of 
all being, which, as he says, so penetrates and per- 
vades all nature as that its elimination would cause 
nature itself to cease: 

"The mountain must have its surface rusted into 
putresence and become dead soil before the herb can 
grow. The destruction of the mineral is the life 
of the vegetable. xA^gain the same process begins. 
The 'corn of wheat dies/ and out of death more 
abundant life is born. Out of the soil in which 
deciduous leaves are buried, the young tree shoots 



58 The: Living Word. 

vigorously, and strikes its roots deep down into the 
realm of decay and death. Upon the life of the 
vegetable world, the myriad forms of higher life 
sustain themselves — still the same law : the sacrifice 
of life to give life. Further still : have we never 
pondered over that mystery of nature — the dove 
struck down by the hawk, the deer trembling be- 
neath the stroke of the lion, the winged fish falling 
into the jaws of the dolphin? It is the solemn law 
of vicarious sacrifice again/' 

Many will remember the conversation . of Ruth 
and David in the farmer's cellar, which Dr. Holland 
sings in "Bitter Sweet," a poem quivering with the 
spirit of this great truth : 

" Ivife evermore is fed by death, 
In earth and sea and sky ; 
And that a rose may breathe its breath 
Something must die. 

Earth is a sepulcher of flowers, 

Whose vitalizing mold 
Through boundless transmutation towers 

In green and gold. 

The falcon preys upon the finch, 

The finch upon the fly, 
And naught will lose the hunger pinch, 

But death's wild cry. 

The milk-haired heifer's life must pass 

That it may fill your own, 
As passed the sweet life of the grass 

She fed upon." 



He Died for Me. 59 

Nor is there any elevation of life, no higher life, 
but by suffering and death : 

" The native orchard's fairest trees, 

Wild springing on the hill, 
Bear no such precious fruits as these, 

And never will, 
Till ax and saw and pruning knife 

Cut from them every bough, 
And they receive a gentler life 

Than crowns them now. 

And Nature's children evermore, 

Though grown to stately stature, 
Must bear the fruit their father's bore — 

The fruits of Nature, — 
Till every thrifty vine is made 

The shoulder of a scion, 
Cut from the budding trees that shade 

The hill of Zion." 

The august voice of this great principle is heard 
everywhere, where the world takes an upward step, 
in the groans of suffering that come from the real 
leaders. Brierley has recently directed our atten- 
tion to a fact of history which we have frequently 
noted, that prisons are apt to get as their occupants 
two classes of persons, the best and the worst. The 
reason he gives is, that these two alike have set 
themselves against the recognized public opinion of 
their country. But there is a deeper reason than that 
for this singular fellowship of the very best and the 



60 The Living Word. 

very worst of our race. It is the law of life wrought 
into the order of the universe as is the law of gravi- 
tation. He who would lift a burden from off his 
fellows must share it. Would you wash out the 
filth from the places of wickedness ? Then you must 
drink their woe without sharing their guilt. You 
must make your grave with the wicked because you 
have done no violence and carried no deceit in your 
mouth. You can not be a world's savior in any 
measure without hanging on a malefactor's cross in 
the midst of the others who merited the punishment. 
The human race has climbed upwards on the slain 
bodies of its martyrs. Our religious liberty was 
purchased for us by those great spirits, of whom the 
world was not worthy. Our national independence 
was secured for us by the blood of our forefathers. 
Even science makes its advances by patient suf- 
fering and voluntary sacrifice. If the laboratory, 
the inquisition, the ices of the pole, could tell their 
story, it would surely give no uncertain utterance 
of this principle of vicarious sacrifice. As science 
opens out to us its mysteries, we find this same 
principle reaching down into the infinitesimals. Put 
the corolla of the geranium which adorns your table, 
under the microscope, and you are amazed at the 
exquisite colors and lines, too delicate to be seen 



He Died for Me. 6i 

by the unaided eye. Use a more powerful lens, 
and you find in the heart of that beauty a many- 
eyed and many-clawed parasite destroying the life 
of the flower to feed its own. Take a still stronger 
lens, and on that living insect is another of a differ- 
ent kind, feeding on the first. A stronger glass 
discovers a third thing of life sucking out that of 
the second. How much farther this fact continues, 
only he can guess whose researches have enabled 
him to see off on that line of mystery where the 
material melts away into the immaterial, just a mass 
of quivering life. Out of the death of the universe 
emerges life. 

Is it difficult for us to believe that this principle, 
which is everywhere in nature, continues in the 
higher sphere of spirit, and that the consummate 
man gives us its consummate illustration ? — He died 
for me. 

3. The principle is written on every page of his- 
tory. Every historic religion has its altar and its 
system of sacrifice. We have seen those old stone 
structures on which that weird priestly order of the 
Druids offered their sacrifices in the gloomy recesses 
of the deeply-shaded oak-groves. Rude altar forms 
of the Aztec people are still extant in Mexico. We 
are familiar with the sacrifices of Persia, Egypt, 



62 The Living Word. 

Greece, Rome, and Israel. But, in addition to these, 
we are told that the far-off Mongols and Tartars 
and Africans, and more obscure races, have left 
abundant remnants of their religion of blood. x\nd 
this sacrificial system reaches as far back as the his- 
torian has been able to cast his eye. We have read 
it on almost the first page of Scripture, where it is 
named as a fact already established. As far back 
as we can trace any people, we can not get beyond 
the altar and the smell of the burning sacrifice. 

Amid manifold diversities in doctrine and 
method, our antiquarians have found among all 
people and in all ages a threefold agreement as to 
their sacrifices : 

( i ) They were made with the purpose of saving 
the offerer from impending wrath. It has been men- 
tioned as a very suggestive fact that every religion 
that has not its root in the soil of revelation, regards 
its God as angry. Hardwick tells us that in Egypt, 
where the people had a peculiar reluctance to shed- 
ding of blood, they themselves trusted by piacular 
offerings to avert the wrath of their hostile deities. 
This was the culminating thought of the Egyptian 
altar, to appease wrath by blood. 

(2) The offerings must be the very choicest. 



He Died for Me. 63 

The selections of the flock must be immaculate. On 
the most momentous occasions, when the most effi- 
cient offerings were demanded, they felt that the 
blood of animals could not take away sins, and there- 
fore they often made a sacrifice of human beings. 
The story of Themistocles offering up the three 
Persians just before the battle of Salamis, and that 
of the multitudes whom Augustus and Sextus Pon- 
tus sacrificed to save the nation, are matters of 
history. 

(3.) The sacrifice of the innocent was required 
to save the guilty. Classic legends abound with 
pathetic stories of such offerings. Every schoolboy 
has felt his sympathies moved by the story of Erec- 
theus offering his beautiful daughter to the gods 
before proceeding to the Eleusinian wars. Who has 
not grieved over the sad story of Agamemnon sur- 
rendering his lovely Iphigenia to Diana? 

However we may explain the origin of this uni- 
versal idea of sacrifice, its essential unity in the 
three particulars we have named, convinces us that 
it belongs to the nature of man, and truthfully ex- 
presses his need. Taking this fact in connection 
with those we have previously named, we have no 
difficulty in accepting the cross as completing all 



64 The Living Word. 

that is meant in the long and dreadful history of 
the soul's search for the washing away of its guilt. 

" In the cross of Christ I glory, 

Towering o'er the wrecks of time ; 
All the light of sacred story- 
Gathers round its head sublime." 

4. It is written on the face of the cross itself. 
The character of Christ's death is such as to be 
utterly inexplicable excepting on the supposition 
that he was making his soul an offering for sin. 

Those who have devoutly studied the details 
of the story of Christ's death have been profoundly 
impressed with two things: First, that it was one 
of indescribable woe, from which his whole being 
revolted as from the curse of God. His soul was 
filled with an unbearable sorrow. He sought to 
escape the very thing he had come to Jerusalem so 
bravely to do. He prayed the Father to withdraw 
the cup. He who heretofore had been so strong 
to bear every grief was now so overcome as to fall 
down upon the ground in anguish that brought a 
sweat of blood. He was filled with awful appre- 
hension. "He was heard in that he feared," says 
the evangelist. He groaned and wept ; and at one 
time it seemed as if he had lost all sense of the 



He Died for Me;. 65 

Divine favor, and cried out, "Why hast thou for- 
saken me?" Other men usually hang upon the 
cross from two to six or more days before they 
are relieved by death; but Jesus hung there but 
six hours. Such was his anguish as to force 
the conviction that some other cause than the 
ordinary effects of the crucifixion hastened his 
death. It is possible, as many able scholars think, 
that he died at last of a literal broken heart. Never, 
in all the records of death, have we seen anything to 
approach that of Jesus in black despair and unutter- 
able w r oe. Paul in his dungeon was triumphant: 
"I am ready to be offered." Peter when sentenced 
to crucifixion, cried, "Let me be crucified with my 
head down; for I am not worthy to die as did my 
Lord." A gentle woman went to the flames of the 
martyr's stake with the triumphant cry, "This is 
the day that crowns are distributed." Even the 
penitent thief, comforted by the promise of Jesus, 
dies in peace. But the Son of God is utterly broken 
in that dread hour. 

Place by the side of that fact this second one, 

that he is the one person of all w T ho have gone the 

way of death, whom we would have expected to 

die in triumph. He was here for the very purpose, 

5 



66 The Living Word. 

as he had said, to give his life a ransom for many. 
This was the culminating point of God's eternal 
scheme for the redemption of the lost world; the 
sublimest hour of all time. His whole heart had 
been given to the finishing of the task. He knew 
that shortly he would be with the Father and the 
world redeemed. In the face of these facts explain 
his cross if you can. There is but one thing that 
makes it even rational, not to say divine : He died 
for us. 

Thus we have seen the redemption principle of 
the cross engraved on the pages of Scripture, Na- 
ture, History, and on the rocks of Golgotha. When 
to this we add the facts of the exceptional personality 
of Jesus, and the resistless might of his influence 
through all subsequent time, we are sure that his 
death was something more than an event of his 
time. It was the event of eternity, and has vital 
bearings upon the entire universe; for, as Hausrath 
admirably says, "The history of the ideal can not 
be an isolated and particular fact; its contents are 
absolute; it has an eternal value which does not 
belong to a given moment, but to the whole of 
mankind." Every man should recognize in such a 
history a mystery of grace consummated also for 
him. 



He Died eor Me. 67 

II. Having established in our minds the eact 
oe Christ's vicarious death, without making 
any attempt to explain its contents, let us rapidly 
note the practical bearings of that fact on our 
personal divine life : "That we should live to- 
gether with him." 

1. It awakens the conscience to a sense of the 
infinite horror of sin. There are other ways in 
which we can learn sin's malignity. When we see 
individuals and whole communities, diseased in 
body, degenerate in mind, and wallowing in sicken- 
ing rottenness of decaying souls, we are horrified. 
But if that were all, it would be possible for us to 
regard it as a dreadful consequence of some natural 
cause, to be healed by wise, economic methods. 
When, in addition to that, we find that generous men 
who set themselves to cleansing these foul places, 
are despised and tormented by those whom they 
would deliver, and finally succumb victims to the 
very pest they seek to remove, we are shocked by 
the perversity of evil. Still our feeling may be the 
farthest removed from any sense of personal guilt. 
Paul tells us of how God would create in the 
hearts of his people the sense of the exceeding sin- 
fulness of sin by the proclamation of the law. In 
that law we see how widely we are removed from 



68 The: Living Word. 

holiness. But the apostle furthermore tells us of 
the effects of its proclamation. First, it created a 
feeling of despair, for no man could measure up 
to its requirements; and, secondly, it produced a 
violent rebound from its impossible demands; and 
out of these came an easy-going fatalism, which 
was not at all helpful to a holy life. Thus the law- 
method did not save. 

Our fathers sought to deepen the sense of sin 
in the popular mind by preaching the wrath of God, 
the terrors of the judgment, and the woes of the 
damned. From this method there was sure to come 
a powerful reaction; for unless carefully guarded, 
it carries with it two fatal defects: it measures the 
malignity of sin by its consequences, and reckons 
salvation to be escape from penalty. That is cer- 
tainly a very superficial view. Hell does not make 
sin what it is, any more than the gallows makes 
murder, murder. Merely to escape the eternal fires 
is not to come into the life of God. 

Doubtless all these methods of viewing sin have 
their value ; but there is no intuition of its character 
so true as that we have in the vision of the cross. 
When I know that He who hangs on that cursed 
tree between those malefactors is the Son of the 
Eternal God, who came from the glory he had with 



He Died for Me. 69 

the Father, for the express purpose of bearing our 
sins and suffering our curse, then my heart is filled 
with great fear. How dreadful is my sin which can 
be sponged out only by the blood of God's own Son ! 
2. It assures us of the absolute certainty of our 
salvation; for it is wrought of God. In every other 
form of religion it is the w T orshiper himself who 
erects his altar; and the object of his sacrifice is to 
appease the wrath of his deity. He is never sure 
that his god is satisfied. But our God has himself 
provided the Lamb for our sacrifice. The cross 
is not our arm reaching out after God, but God's 
own arm reaching down into the depths of our sin 
for us. We can not emphasize too strongly the 
fact that Christ is the gift of God: "He gave his 
only begotten Son." The word, as indicated in the 
context, expresses a gift carried to the extreme limit 
of sacrifice: "He spared not his own Son, but de- 
livered him up for us all." This gift of immeasur- 
able love is the warrant and proof that nothing will 
be left undone that infinite wisdom and power can 
do, to complete our redemption : "How shall he ' 
not with him also freely give us all things ?" Thus 
the cross means the positive surety of our salvation : 
"For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to 
obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ." 



70 The; Living Word. 

3. It is the secret and source of our participa- 
tion with him in his life. "He died for us that we 
should live together with him." When we contem- 
plate the cross, with the spirit of receptivity (faith, 
if you prefer the word), three things occur. Two 
I have named: a revolt of soul from the horrible 
sin which required that sacrifice; and a glorious 
assurance that its stains are wiped away by God's 
own hand. Then we are in a condition of absorbed 
attention in which the very life of Christ comes into 
our being, reproducing himself in us. Paul states it 
with wonderful accuracy: "I am crucified with 
Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ 
liveth in me; and the life I now live in the flesh, 
I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved 
me and gave himself for me." 

It is an experience so far removed from the 
natural as to make it all but impossible to find an 
adequate image. One has tried to illustrate it by 
reference to the power of the sunlight to imprint 
the human face upon the sensitized plate, and to 
multiply its lineaments in a thousand copies, fac- 
similes of their prototype. But the illustration is not 
adequate; for not only is Christ's image imprinted 
there, but his actual life is communicated. 

He lives again in us. Our life henceforth is not 



He Died for Me. 71 

merely a life like his, but his very own, carrying 
with it in potentiality all that is his, and making it 
possible for even us to become, like him, sons of 
God. "But as many as received him, to them gave 
he power to become the sons of God, even to them 
that believe on his name." 



IV. 

THE BLESSEDNESS OF PARDON. 

"Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, 
• whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto 
whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity/' — Psa. 
xxxii, I, 2. 

This is one of the most joyful strains from the 
Hebrew Psalter. Its music is that of silver bells 
ringing merrily into the noise of clapping hands and 
the pattering feet of holy dance. 

There is some doubt whether the word blessed 
is an adjective or a noun; but it is certainly plural 
in its form, and is rendered by many of our best 
commentators "O the happinesses !" The psalm be- 
gins with this joyful shout twice repeated, "O the 
happinesses !" "O the happinesses !" And this ex- 
ultant strain continues throughout the entire sang, 
closing with the ecstatic cry, "Be glad in the Lord, 
and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye 
that are upright in heart." And yet the psalm 
stands in immediate connection with one of the sad- 

72 



The Blessedness of Pardox. 73 

dest (the fifty-first), which is the groaning of a 
soul in the anguish of guilt. Both are historically 
connected with the same event — David's awful sin. 
One is the song of penitence; the other is the song 
of pardon. 

The psalm, however, is not simply the outburst 
of David's joy, as though he were alone and singular 
in it, but was sung purposely for those who, like the 
sinning king, have suffered the ache of tormenting 
guilt. Notice the title, Maschil. It means instruc- 
tion. David put his experience in immortal verse 
expressly to teach fallen men that they need not 
despair. By the grace of pardon, joy will come 
again to the sin-burdened soul. And that is the 
service that this psalm has rendered in history. 
Luther pronounced it one of the four most pre- 
cious in the entire book, "Because," said he, "it 
teaches that pardon of sin comes without the law, to 
the man who believes." The dying St. Augustine 
had it written on the wall of the room where he lay, 
that it might be constantly before his eyes. Paul, 
in writing to the Jewish Christians in Rome, en- 
forces the doctrine of justification by faith, by quot- 
ing these verses. The Jew seeking pardon on the 
great day of atonement, chanted this psalm. 

Is there any one who knows the bitterness of a 



74 The Living Word. 

great sin, and fears that he can never be perfectly 
happy again, let him be instructed. There is a 
great joy possible for even him. The silver bells 
may make melody in his heart. "O the happi- 
nesses !" 

I. The: blessedness of pardon is threefold, as 
suggested by the triple expression of the text, 
"Whose transgression is forgiven;" "Whose sin 
is covered;" "To whom the Lord imputeth not 
iniquity. 

Here are three different terms to express three 
different aspects or consequences of our wrong, — 
transgression, or antagonism to God, by which 
we are alienated from him; sin, or a deflection 
from the true line of our life, and so a spoiling 
of our history; iniquity, or guilt, the effect of our 
wrong on our own spirit, affecting memory, con- 
science, and all our sensibilities. Pardon recovers us 
on all these sides. It restores us to God's favor. It 
rights the course of our broken lives. It lifts from 
the spirit the burden of its intolerable load. Let us 
look at this threefold happiness in particular. 

i. It restores us to God's favor. Sin alienates 
the soul and God. This is a statement so often 
made from the pulpit as to invite the charge of a 



The: Blessedness cf Pardon. 75 

platitude. But it is not spoken from the sacred 
desk alone. It is proclaimed with ominous empha- 
sis in the sinner's own breast. One can not at the 
same time live in sin and be at peace with God. The 
sinner dislikes God ; he purposely turns his thoughts 
away from him, and tries to forget him. Or he is 
afraid of him, and, like the sinner of Eden, tries 
to hide from him. Or he affects to despise him. 
He blasphemes his holy name. He questions his ex- 
istence, and believes hard things of him. In short, 
he is God's enemy. ''You were sometime alienated 
and enemies in your mind by wicked works." (Col. 
i, 21.) 

But let not the sinner deceive himself with the 
belief that the enmity is all on his side. There is 
a common sentiment existing among us which 
greatly weakens the gravity of the consequences of 
our sin; which is, that while it makes us hostile to 
God, it leaves him our Friend. Xot so does the 
Scripture represent the case. While it proclaims the 
love of God, it also tells of his wrath : "God is angry 
with the wicked every day.'' Paul, in Romans v, 10, 
speaks of enemies reconciled by the death of Christ, 
where the word describes the relation of God to us, 
rather than our relation to God. There is a dread 
and awful sense in which God is the sinner's enemv. 



76 The Living Word. 

We could easily quote passage after passage in con- 
firmation of this terrible fact, which these modern 
days would veil. But this self-blinding is of no 
avail. "Out of Christ our God is a consuming fire." 

Of course, when we speak of the wrath of God, 
we are to dissociate it from all those defilements 
which usually attach to this sentiment in human 
beings; such as burning passion, unreasoning irri- 
tation, or personal resentment. But when these de- 
fects are eliminated, there remains an element di- 
vine, which is as sublime as it is awful. It is the 
revolt of infinite holiness from everything that is 
unholy, the antipathy of good for evil. It is inflex- 
ible justice which can not suffer wrong. 

And this makes pardon no easy thing. For God 
to forgive out of his great love, without exacting 
any conditions, would be for him to be unjust. It 
would be for him to destroy the order of the uni- 
verse, which he has arranged in infinite wisdom 
for the good of all his creatures. Right is defined 
to be "the order among all things which results 
from their very nature. Divine justice is the 
guardian of this order, and consequently the guar- 
antee of the existence of right in the universe." In 
our National Government the pardoning power is 
vested in the Executive. This is said to be done, 



The: Blessedness of Pardon. 77 

partly, because of the impossibility of shaping a law 
which will in every case express exact justice. It is 
a sad thing when the judiciary, fettered by the stat- 
ute, is compelled to give decisions which injure that 
fine sense of justice which is innate in the human 
breast. Then, too, both the lawmakers and the 
judges are fallible, and it is a wise provision for 
meeting certain exigencies that the Executive, by 
his own will, can override the sentence of the court 
and remit the penalty it has pronounced. Yet wise 
as this arrangement is, it is a perilous thing to ex- 
ercise the pardoning power too freely. Suppose our 
governor, impelled by mighty love, should pardon 
all the criminals in our State. It would jar the ma- 
chinery of government, and endanger the very foun- 
dations of society. 

But God's law has no defects. Its decisions 
are invariably just; and for God to forgive wrong 
without conditions would be for him to destroy 
right, and to disorder the universe. It is no easy 
thing to forgive sin. The hardest question ever put 
is, "How can man be just with God?" But while 
God is just, his name is Love; and out of the depths 
of infinite wisdom, Love has found a way by which 
he can "be just and the justifier of them that be- 
lieve." This is the mystery of the Cross. "At that 



78 



The: Living Word. 



time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the 
commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the 
covenants of promise, having no hope, and without 
God in the world : but now, in Christ Jesus, ye who 
sometime were far off are made nigh by the blood 
of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made 
both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of 
partition between us; having abolished in his flesh 
the enmity, even the law of commandments con- 
tained in ordinances ; for to make in himself of twain 
one new man, so making peace ; and that he might 
reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, 
having slain the enmity thereby." (Eph. ii, 12-16.) 
This is what Paul states with such concentrated 
wisdom in Rom. iii, 24-26 — a passage which Godet 
calls "the marrow of theology," and which Calvin 
says is the most profound statement in the Scrip- 
tures, of the righteousness of God in Christ : "Being 
justified freely by his grace through the redemption 
that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth 
to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to 
declare his righteousness for the remission of sins 
that are past, through the forbearance of God: to 
declare, I say, at this time his righteousness : that 
he might be just, and the justifier of him which 
believeth in Jesus." 



The Blessedness oe Pardon. 79 

Here the phrase "to declare his righteousness" 
occurs twice. The context will not suffer us to un- 
derstand by these words "to manifest God's char- 
acter." If that were what the apostle were empha- 
sizing so strongly, he had other terms at his com- 
mand which he was continually using in the epistle, 
to express its manifold excellence; such as good- 
ness, faithfulness, grace, holiness. It is a legal 
phrase, and means the pronouncement of acquittal. 

Paul here describes the administrative act of the 
Judge of all, by which he remits the penalty of sin, 
and so places the sinner in relation to his govern- 
ment exactly as though the sin had never been com- 
mitted. The law can never again arrest the crimi- 
nal for the crime from which the court of pardons 
has released him. In this sense the pardoned sin- 
ner is 

" Free from the law, O happy condition ! 
Jesus hath bled, and there is remission ; 
Cursed by the law, and bruised by the fall, 
Grace hath redeemed us once for all." 

While this is the fundamental element in pardon 
which God declares, there are two others so closely 
related to it as to be inseparable from it. The first 
is, that the act of pardon is not only a legal but a 
righteous act. As we have already said, to justify 



80 Ths Living Word. 

the guilty is itself injustice; and it is only by the 
cross that God can be both "just and the justifier" 
of them that believe. 

That means not only that a holy God may take 
believing penitents into his favor, but that he must 
do so. He can not be righteous and do otherwise. 
If the penitent is depressed with the sense of his 
guilt, and fears that God may withhold his favor, let 
him bear in mind that the tragedy of Calvary gives 
him the right of pardon. His hope is not alone in 
God's mercy, but in his justice as well. "Surely 
his salvation is nigh them that fear him. Mercy 
and truth are met together ; righteousness and peace 
have kissed each other/' It is a pity that our sense 
of God's righteousness is not as true as was the 
old Hebrew's who made such joyful appeals to the 
judgment. "The throne of his judgment" was not 
to them a thought of terror. It meant vindication 
by his perfect holiness. They pleaded his righteous- 
ness ; we plead his mercy. But our salvation stands 
as truly in one as in the other. 

The other thing included in this feature of 
God's pardon, is forgiveness. The two terms are 
commonly used interchangeably; but there is a 
difference. Pardon is the act of the officer, and is 
administrative; forgiveness is the act of the indi- 



The; Blessedness oe Pardon. 8i 

vidual,and is personal. The one adjusts the offender 
to the government; the other adjusts him to the 
person. 

Now, sin is not only a violation of heaven's 
law, but is also an offense to God; and reconcilia- 
tion is not completed when the penalty is remitted. 
Loving relations must be restored. We have known 
those who were once close friends, hopelessly es- 
tranged, even after the law had adjusted their con- 
tentions. It is not so in our relations to God. Par- 
don includes forgiveness. God is no longer our 
enemy. Our sin is treated as though it were not, so 
far as it effects our relation to him. Notice the 
terms. He takes it away — forgiven. He hides it 
out of his sight — covers. He blots it from his book 
— impnteth not. How the Scriptures wrestle with 
language to show how utterly obliterated from 
God's mind is the sin which is pardoned: "Forgot- 
ten;" "cast into the sea;" "blotted out as a thick 
cloud ;" "removed as far as the east from the west." 

"O, the happinesses" of the pardoned man ! Ht 
is set right with God. 

2. A second feature of our sin is, it enters into 
and mars our history. As the word in our text 
indicates, the sinner misses the mark. His life is 
spoilt. A second happiness of pardon is, that God, 



82 The: Living Word. 

by his mighty power, so transmutes it, as out of 
great wrong to bring good. 

In making this point we must guard against a 
misapprehension. No repentance and pardon can 
recall an act that is once done, nor put the actor in 
the place he would have held had he never sinned. 
Every sin becomes a curse that goes into history. 
Nothing can recover it; for nature is merciless and 
never forgives. Pardon will not recover the mur- 
dered man nor restore the innocence of a spoiled 
home. It is best never to have sinned. Innocence 
alone is strength. That is a false doctrine and very 
hurtful which teaches that sin is a necessary stage 
through which a finite being must pass toward moral 
perfection. 

But while that is true, the sinner need not de- 
spair; for it is also true that our God can convert 
even wrong into good. There are passages of Scrip- 
ture that plainly tell of a complete eradication of 
sin from the heart: "white as snow;" "washed 
robes;" "without spot or blemish;" "unblamable." 
The fall of Adam seemed to defeat the Divine plan. 
But while centuries of sorrow have followed the 
great catastrophe, yet note the good that has come 
of it, — the revelation of redeeming love, and the 
reconciliation of angels. Has not Peter's sin, which 



The Blessedness of Pardon. 83 

seemed to have hopelessly ruined his life, greatly 
helped him to "strengthen the brethren?" He only 
echoed a common feeling who said, "I have got- 
ten vastly more help from the blunders of the saints 
than from all their excellencies." This dreadful 
sin of David, which brought such misery to him- 
self and his country, has been turned into a bless- 
ing for the world. Caldwell truly says, "The story 
of David's sin told with tears of grief, and the 
story of God's free pardon told with tears of joy, 
have brought light and consolation to many a heart 
which otherwise would have been consumed with 
despair." My sinning brother, your life is not nec- 
essarily spoiled. Be happy. How ? "Let the wicked 
forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his 
thoughts : and let him return unto the Lord, and he 
will have mercy upon him ; and to our God, for he 
will abundantly pardon." (Isa. lv, 7.) 

3. A third happiness of the pardoned sinner is 
the lifting of the oppressive sense of guilt from off 
his spirit. A forgiven man is not a wretched man. 
Into the depths of his grief God comes with such 
compassion and revelation of himself as to make 
the sinner feel that he is almost willing to have gone 
into the deeps to have such a contact with God. 
Said a recovered penitent, "By the measure of the 



84 The Living Word. 

pit from which he has lifted me, do I measure the 
love which has redeemed me." How like the wo- 
man of Magdala of whom Jesus said, "Her sins, 
which are many, are forgiven ; for she loved much : 
but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth 
little." (Luke vii, 47.) 

II. To WHOM COMES THE JOY OF PARDON ? 

David himself replies out of his happy experi- 
ence. It comes to him who confesses : "I acknowl- 
edged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I 
not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions 
unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of 
my sin." That is the essential rule of the Gospel 
before the Gospel times. Long after David, John 
wrote, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and 
just to forgive us our sins." (1 John i, 9.) 

1. The true penitent does not hide his sin from 
himself. There is a reckless way which many of 
us have in acknowledging our transgressions, which 
indicates the utter shallowness of the feeling that 
prompted it. It is the smart of pride, or the dreacl 
of exposure, rather than the awful sense of sin. It 
cries like the big, unkingly Saul, "I have played the 
fool exceedingly." That is a shallow form of regret 
which calls its sin only a folly. It bears no more 



The Blessedness of Pardon. 85 

resemblance to penitence than profanity bears to 
prayer. The shallowness of such regrets is seen 
in the fact that we return again to the sin we re- 
gret. But when the deep sense of sin comes upon us, 
it haunts the soul like a specter ; it turns the joys of 
life into bitterness, and fills the future with dread 
apprehension. Then, there is no attempt at self- 
deception, for silence is torment. "When I kept si- 
lence my bones waxed old through my roaring all 
the day long. For day and night thy hand was 
heavy upon me; my moisture is turned into the 
drought of summer." In this pain of conscious 
guilt, the genuine penitent takes no comfort in veil- 
ing his wrong behind sweet names. He no longer 
makes excuses, nor tries to forget his sin in other 
things. "My sin is ever before me." 

2. He takes his sins to God. "I acknowledge 
my sin unto thee." This is needful for relief; for 
even the instinct of nature cries, "Make a clean 
breast of it." The man who continues in an un- 
confessed wrong is ever apprehensive, as though 
the universe were against him. And it certainly is, 
for nature is God's instrument. "He that covereth 
his sins shall not prosper : but whoso confesseth and 
forsaketh them shall have mercy." 

All sin is against God; and a good indication of 



86 The Living Word. 

true penitence is that it feels the God-bearings of 
wrong-doing. Men commonly measure the enormity 
of their sins by their effects on themselves or their 
fellows Murder is wrong, because it robs another 
of his life; theft and falsehood are wrong, because 
of the harm they bring to the community. And so 
of all sins : their enormity is fixed by the magnitude 
of their results in society. 

Not so does the Word of God view sin. It is a 
transgression of the law of God. It is a personal 
affront; and its penalty is not only natural, but 
judicial. To God then must it be confessed; and 
from him alone can come acquittal. And so the hap- 
piness of forgiveness is something more than mere 
pardon, which is simply an administrative act by 
which penalty is remitted; it is the joy of God's 
personal act by which he reinstates the offender in 
his favor, and restores loving relations which the 
sin had broken. 

O, the happiness! With all the wrongs of the 
past wiped out, with the dread of the future all 
removed, with the blessed sense of restored fellow- 
ship with God, well may we "be glad in the Lord 
and shout for joy." 



V. 

LIFE BY FAITH. 

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my 
word and believeth on him that sent me, hath 
eternal life: and shall not come into the judg- 
ment, for he is passed from death into life" — 
John v, 24 (New Version). 

What our Savior teaches us here with this tre- 
mendous threefold emphasis, "Verily, verily, I say 
unto you/' is, that eternal life is not merely a thing 
of the hereafter, into which we enter when we die, 
but a thing of the present, into which we enter when 
we believe. Xotice the tenses: heareth, believeth, 
hath, is passed. There is, indeed, one verb in tEe 
future tense; but that carries our thought away on 
to the judgment-day, the condemnation of which 
we will escape because of the prior fact of having 
passed out of death into life. The way of life is 
not the grave, but the cross. 

With this fact in mind, let us inquire as to two 
things : 

87 



88 The Living Word. 

I. The meaning of this famiijar, but com- 
monly-misunderstood expression, "Eternal 
Life." 

ii. how we may come into it. 

I am, then, first of all, to attempt to give some 
definite conception of the New Testament signifi- 
cance of this profound mystery, eternal life. But 
where shall I begin to lay my little line to measure 
that, the very name of which suggests the immeas- 
urable ? 

i. I confess at the very start that I am not able 
to tell the meaning of the word life in its simplest 
and most obvious sense. Nor do I believe the man 
exists who can. We are familiar with the laborious 
efforts the scholars in the schools of physical science 
and metaphysical theology have made to shape some 
sort of a definition of the word. But the very ablest 
attempts are confessed failures. Its meaning re- 
fuses to be caught in speech. It has been likened 
to the goddess Isis, whose veil may not be lifted 
by mortal hand. 

And yet there is perhaps nothing which we know 
so well. It is the first affirmation of consciousness, 
the primal fact on which all our after knowledge 
is built. I live. If I know not that, there is nothing 



Life by Faith. 89 

at all that I do know. The light has gone out, 
and all things have disappeared in darkness. But 
no man questions the certainty of this first truth of 
consciousness. In every part of our complex being 
we have the constant and unmistakable certainty of 
life. Place your finger on your wrist and find 
your pulse. There is the steady beating of the 
stream of life, — life physical, a mystery unfathom- 
able, but a fact asserted in all our sensations and 
organic activities. 

Look a little deeper, and you find a movement 
of another kind. There are mind-throbs. Thoughts 
follow thoughts on and on, away beyond the bounds 
of our material being. It is life intellectual. Look 
deeper still, and you find movements essentially dif- 
ferent from those we have named; movements too 
large to be described by the pulsing of the arteries. 
They come like tidal-waves that originate in some 
far-off Infinite ; that follow the wake of some heav- 
enly movement; that dash along the shores of life's 
history, and then roll on and on, back into the In- 
finite again. It is life spiritual. Then look about 
you, and you see multiplied activities which we can 
describe by no better -term than this one, which we 
are unable to define, life. There is family life, 
social life, political life, educational life, the life of 



go The Living Word. 

morals, science, religion. Surely, if there is a thing 
which we do know, it is this mystery of life. 

We feel justified, then, in proceeding with our 
study, even without a definition of that of which we 
speak. 

2. When Jesus came, he took this undefined word 
and put into it meanings larger than it ever carried 
before: so that it became a brand-new word in his- 
tory. Hence the apostle speaking of it in after 
days, said, "Christ has brought life to light in the 
gospel." 

This larger meaning of the word we are able to 
state in a single sentence ; aye, in a single word. But 
we do not believe that that is the better way to bring 
its divine significance to our hearts. We are so apt 
to blind ourselves with familiar terms, mistaking 
familiarity with the sound for an understanding of 
the living truth it bears; just as children think they 
know a man when they are told his name. Let us, 
then, take a few instances in which the great Teacher 
uses the word in its new meaning, and gather its sig- 
nificance directly from his lips. 

When the young man came running to Jesus, 
asking, "Master, what must I do that I may inherit 
eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "If thou wouldst 
enter into life, keep the commandments." Plainly 



Lire by Faith. 91 

Jesus meant something more than simple life; for 
the young man might live, in that sense, even while 
he failed to keep the commandments. Jesus meant 
a life conforming to the Divine type — a life of obe- 
dience, holiness. God's law, by obeying which we 
live, is not a set of rules which he has arbitrarily laid 
on us to regulate our conduct, and which he might 
have made different if he had so willed. There is 
nothing arbitrary in the moral law. It is what it is 
of necessity, and could not have been made other- 
wise. Its basis is God's own character. Hence 
every law is the expression of some feature in the 
character of Him who is infinite in his holiness. To 
keep his commandments is to become like God. 
Hence the life of obedience is the life of holiness. 
Having said this, Jesus made the young man realize 
that perfect obedience could not stand in the will 
alone, but must proceed from the heart. God is 
love; and he who loves, lives. Thus Jesus taught 
that the path to life is love that issues into holy 
living. 

Take a second instance. Jesus says, "He that 
followeth after me shall not walk in darkness, but 
shall have the light of- life." What he teaches here 
is, that the man who is guided by him in all the 
walks of life shall constantly discern vital truth. 



9 2 The Living Word. 

What we see depends on what we are. Character 
is the eye that sees. This text is parallel to the be- 
atitude, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
shall see God." Light is spiritual vision. Life is 
holiness of heart. "The light of life" is the vision of 
a clean heart. 

From these and similar passages, in which the 
New Testament abounds, it is evident that whatever 
else may be meant by the term life, this is an essen- 
tial part of its meaning. It means existence in its 
fullest health — holiness. 

There are grades of life. First, there is the 
physical. This we have in common with the ani- 
mal. We eat and drink and luxuriate like beasts. 
Then, there is the life intellectual and moral. This 
is vastly fuller than the first, though it may not 
be so long. Hence the force of the oft-quoted sen- 
timent — 

" We live in deeds, not years ; in thoughts, not breaths ; 
In feelings, not in figures on a dial." 

Did not Paul live more in less than sixty years 
than Methuselah in nearly a thousand? The true 
way to measure life is not by its length,- but by 
its fullness. The fullest life of all is that into 
which he comes whose spirit, the divine organ in 



Life by Faith. 93 

him, is quickened into consciousness and activity. 
The spiritual, or conscious God-life, lifts its pos- 
sessors into a sphere of being as far above the 
intellectual and moral as this latter is above the 
physical. Sensation — thoughts — divinity. This is 
the order. This last is that of which our Savior 
speaks when he says, "I am come that ye might 
have life, and that ye may have it more abundantly." 

3. This fullness of life, or holiness, is the im- 
partation of the very life of God, hence is some- 
times called the God-life. 

I believe that now it is commonly conceded that 
there is no life without parentage; that is to say, 
that life comes only of life. I know that there are 
those who are investigating off on the frontiers of 
science, where physics merge into the mysteries of 
metaphysics, w 7 ho are not so certain of the genesis 
of life. But until these scholars come from their 
studies with something more than the stammerings 
of a guess, and are in better agreement among 
themselves, we will continue to hold to what seem 
to be the plain statements of the Word of God, and 
are the common facts of our own observation. Life 
comes only of life. If- we would get grain out of 
the field, we must put living grains into it. Not by 
chemistry, but by vegetation, come our harvests. 



94 The Living Word. 

Not only so, but every different kind of life produces 
its own, and not another kind. An oak will not 
grow an apple, nor an apple an elm. Each plant 
bears fruit "whose seed is in itself, after its kind." 
And that principle which holds in all the lower kinds 
of life, holds in all the higher. A man is born, not 
of an animal, but of human parents. "Life never 
overleaps the limits traced for it in the original cre- 
ation." A son of God must be born of God. "But 
to as many as received him, to them gave he power 
to become the sons of God, even to them that be- 
lieve on his name; which were born not of blood, 
nor of the will of man, but of God." "Marvel not 
that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." This 
fullest life is ours by that Divine generation by 
which God communicates to us his own nature. 

A mystery? Yes. So it is also a mystery how 
you are the projection of your parents' life, a sepa- 
rate personality in the universe. I stand confounded 
in the presence I name. I name it, however, 
not to explain it, but to emphasize the fact. This 
holiness which Jesus calls life, emanates from the 
very person of God. It is his very life. We call 
it Spirit. It comes as a quickening power. . A bold 
thinker, in speaking of this mystery, says, "There 
takes place, in the believer by the power of the Holy 



Life by Faith. 95 

Spirit, an effect similar- to that which produced the 
miraculous birth of Jesus Christ.'' Certain it is that 
Christ is formed within us by this communication of 
his life. He is multiplied in believers. We are all 
the sons of God by faith in Jesus. 

4. This Divine life is called eternal, because it is 
the same in kind as that life which He lives whose 
existence covers eternity. We usually understand 
by the eternal life, life perpetuated forever, its end- 
lessness being its distinctive feature. But that is 
certainly not its meaning here. That life can be 
affirmed of the unbeliever as of the believer. The 
godless man will live as long as the godly. And 
if by the eternal life we understand the endless life, 
we have lost the distinction which Paul would make 
in "The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God 
is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord." Does he 
mean to teach that the life of the godless ceases with 
death ? 

Furthermore, this is an utter misuse of words. 
What is eternity? Eternity is duration without be- 
ginning or end. It covers not only the infinite fu- 
ture,, but also the infinite past. It is "from everlast- 
ing to everlasting." Consequently, there is but one 
being whose existence can be said to cover eternity : 
the uncreatable and incorruptible Spirit — God. "I 



96 The Living Word. 

am the high and lofty ONE which inhabiteth eter- 
nity." So when we speak of eternal life, we do not 
mean a life which, when once begun, will never 
cease. We mean the life that God lives. Its dis- 
tinguishing feature is not its endlessness, but its 
Divinity. To partake of the eternal life is to partake 
of those Divine energies that inhere in the character 
of Deity; such as right, purity, truth, peace, joy, 
holiness, love. These are the elements of eternal 
life. To perpetuate anything forever which does not 
belong to the character of him who lives in eternity, 
is not to make it eternal. Suppose you take the op- 
posite of those virtues I have just named — hatred, 
wrong, falsehood, strife, uncleanness, deviltry — and 
then add to them everlastingness ; will that make 
eternal life? That is, rather, endless death. Nor 
would it make anything else Divine to perpetuate it 
forever. Your earth-life, however pleasant it may 
be, if continued through eternity, would become 
death. How we deceive ourselves in this particular, 
imagining that the present good without alloy, would 
be Heaven, if it could continue forever. 

I once heard a loving mother say of her beauti- 
ful babe, who was shaking his tinkling rattle and 
prattling with inexpressible sweetness, "Mamma, 
mamma:" "O, if I could only keep him baby for- 



Lira by Faith. 97 

ever !" It was a foolish wish. Imagine forty years 
rolled around, and that mother with her wish 
granted, herself an aged women, and her forty-year- 
old baby on her lap, swinging his rattle and crying, 
"Mamma, mamma !" Infancy perpetuated into man- 
hood is idiocy. The mother got her wish, and she 
got a fool. So earth-life, however sweet it may be 
now, if perpetuated into eternity, would be hell. 
Time-life without end is not eternity. 

But if we have the things that are true, and hon- 
est, and just, and lovely, and pure, and of good re- 
port, we have the things that are as old as God and 
as ceaselessly new. They were before the morning 
stars sang together, and will be when the heavens 
are rolled together as a scroll and the elements are 
consumed with fervent heat. To have them is to 
have the very power of the eternal. Hence I say that 
the eternal life is more than a thing of the future. 
It is a present possession. It is the new life that we 
have when we are born of the Spirit and become 
the sons of God. 

5. This life has the promise and certainty of 
everlasting continuance, just as the unseen life 
which streams in the tree is the promise of golden 
fruit. If the vital force in the peach-tree were con- 
scious of itself and understood its own nature, it 
7 



98 The Living Word. 

would in all its progress have this confidence, that, 
excluding the possibility of a blight, it must pro- 
duce peaches. That is the very essence of its be- 
ing, the peach-producing power. At every lower 
stage of its growth, it would say : "This is not all. 
The life in me asserts and assures something be- 
yond. Only when I come into the fruit is my des- 
tiny complete." 

Now, this new life we have in God is the con- 
scious life. The man who has the love of God in 
his heart knows it. One such asserted, "I have 
risen out of the darkness of doubt, and walk in the 
light of a day where God is ever light." Another, 
speaking of the transcendent facts of life and im- 
mortality, states his faith and the ground of it 
thus: "I know whom I have believed, and am 
persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have 
committed unto him against that day." So we all 
who live in Christ have, according to the measure 
of our spiritual vitality, such a consciousness of 
indestructible life as makes us positive of immor- 
tality. I will not say that such a man is conscious 
of immortality, for consciousness is cognizant only 
of present acts and states; but this I do say, that the 
new life is constantly increasing in fullness and 
power as it grows older. Aye, even when the body 



Life by Faith. 99 

is breaking down and the mind grows feeble, this 
God-life increases in strength. "Though the out- 
ward man perisheth, the inward man is renewed day 
by day/' He is conscious of possessing a deathless 
principle, which banishes the very thought of death 
and decay. It is "the power of an endless life." 

II. HOW MAY WD COME) INTO THE U^E ETERNAL? 

Two things : 

1. "He that heareth my word/' The simple ac- 
ceptance of Christ's word on the testimony of God 
is the sole condition of this inestimable blessing. 
Do that, and all is done. The promise is not shall 
have, but hath eternal life. At once you can say 
with Paul, "The life I now live, I live by faith of 
the Son of God." 

The ground of our faith in Jesus is God's testi- 
mony. Our Redeemer would impress upon his 
hearers the fact that God in whom they believed 
indorsed him. They might refuse to accept his 
own witness of himself. They might even reject 
John the Baptist's testimony. "But I have a greater 
witness than that of John : for the w T orks which the 
Father hath given me to finish, the same worKs 
that I do, bear witness of me, that the Father hath 
sent me. And the Father himself, which hath sent 



ioo The Living Word. 

me, hath borne witness of me. . . . Search the 
Scriptures : for in them ye think ye have eternal life : 
and they are they which testify of me. And ye will 
not come to me that ye might have life." 

So I would say to you who long for eternal life, 
search the record that ye may learn what God him- 
self says about it. His word is that that life is 
in Christ. He imparts it to us in him. 

"If we receive the witness of men, the witness 
of God is greater: for this is the witness of God 
which he hath testified of his Son. He that believeth 
on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he 
that believeth not God hath made him a liar ; because 
he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son. 
And this is the record, that God hath given to us 
eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath 
the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of 
God hath not life. These things have I written unto 
you that believe on the name of the Son of God; 
that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and 
that ye may believe on the name of the Son of 
God." (i John v, 9-13.) 

There, brothers, is the rock of your faith; not 
your experiences, or your feelings, or even your 
holiness; but Christ, the gift of the Father. God's 
Word is surer than all things else besides. 



Lire by Faith. ioi 

2. "Believeth on him that sent me." Having 
heard the record of the Divine method of salvation, 
the only thing for us to do is to accept it. 

The trouble with many of us is, we complicate 
God's method of life by numberless devices of our 
own, — sacrifices, penances, prayers, and many a 
thing which, good in itself, is only a rotting timber 
when made the ground of our hope. It is a fatal 
thing when we transfer our faith from what Christ 
is, to what we have done or are doing even in his 
name. What is the gospel but this, that God has 
wrought for us a finished salvation, which is offered 
us as his own free gift on the simple condition of 
our accepting it? What saves me? The fact that 
I have gone through certain emotional changes, or 
attained certain virtues? Verily not; but this: 
Christ has died for me. Christ is my life ; his work, 
his death, his intercession. 

" Not all our groans and tears, 

Nor works which we have done, 
Nor vows, nor promises, nor prayers, 
Can e'er for sin atone. 

High lifted on the cross 

The spotless Victim dies ; 
This is salvation's only source ; 

Hence all our hopes arise." 



VI. 

THE INWARD REAL. 

"He is not a Jew which is one outwardly; but he 
is a Jew which is one inwardly." — Rom. ii, 28, 29. 

This is Paul's way of asserting the great prin- 
ciple that it is not the outward but the inward 
qualifications that make the man. The Jew had the 
idea that the only divine manhood acceptable to 
God was the Jew. Hence he who would come into 
the Divine favor must become one of the chosen 
race. Not to be a Jew was to be excluded from all 
the mysteries of the great salvation. 

Let us note the points of difference between the 
outward and the inward Jew. It will aid our 
vision of the essential elements of the Christian 
life. 

I. The; outward Jew is one who is born of the 

CHOSEN RACE. 

He has Abrahamic blood in his veins. That 
makes him a Jew. The inward Jew is one who has 

102 



The Inward Real. 103 

the faith, the consecration, the holy purpose of 
Abraham. It is not the ancient blood, but the 
ancient character that makes the real Jew. 

Unfortunately, our Hebrew brethren have, to 
their great distress, overlooked this fact, which 
seems to us so self-evident. We once asked an 
eminent Jewish lawyer, who had discarded about 
everything essentially Jewish, but still clung tena- 
ciously to his race, why he did not abandon that 
also, and dissolve his national idiosyncrasy in the 
common humanity. He replied with feeling: "We 
have a pure blood, unmixed by other strains, older 
by thousands of years than the royalties of history. 
If there be anything in ancient blood, we have the 
best." He kept the casket, but lost the gems. 

1. The outward is not to be despised. It is no 
idle thing to have behind us generations of noble 
men, whose achievements we inherit. It is no vain 
thing to be the heirs of an immeasurable past, to be 
born in a country like ours, where the temple of 
liberty stands built inch by inch by the slow toil of 
mighty men, who suffered and sacrificed for the joy 
of after generations. 

A noble pedigree is a priceless possession. It is 
not an empty boast to be able to say, "I am an Anglo- 
Saxon and not a Mongolian." Where one is born 



io4 The: Living Word. 

and bred is more than a mere incident. It means 
an immeasurable difference both in endowment and 
in opportunity, whether we were born in this great 
Republic, or among the savages of Africa ; in a re- 
fined and historic family, or among the degenerates 
in the lowest slums. But the one thing of supreme 
value, towering over all mere external advantage, 
is the inward. The genius of Isaac Watts flashed 
a mighty truth when he replied to the English lord, 
who, seeing the little, pale-faced poet for the first 
time, thoughtlessly ejaculated his surprise aloud, 
"Is this the great Watts?" Watts, laying his slen- 
der fingers on the breast of the stalwart lord, im- 
provised these familiar lines: 

" Were I so tall to reach the pole, 
Or grasp the ocean in my span, 
I must be measured by my soul : 

The mind 's the measure of the man. 

So God measures men. When Samuel, im- 
pressed by the personal presence of Eliab, said, 
"Surely the Lord's anointed is before me," the Lord 
corrected him: "Look not on his countenance, nor 
on the height of his stature ; because I have refused 
him : for the Lord seeth not as man seeth .; for man 
looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord 
looketh on the heart." And that is our intuition. 



The Inward Real. 105 

You are introduced to a man of great fame, a 
splendid history, a fine presence. But some one 
whispers in your ear, "He is false and treacherous ;" 
and your hero is degraded in your eyes. Here is 
a woman as beautiful as Recamier, as intellectual 
as Madam de Stael, as imperial as Catherine de 
Medici, as magnificent in her attire as Marie An- 
toinette; but she is unclean, and we shrink from 
her as from a leper. Character is the peerless thing. 

2. Character is not the product of the outward. 
Men have argued that it is. Give, they say, a favor- 
able birth and a favoring environment, and you 
will have the finest result. Heredity and endow- 
ment are the secret of character. 

For some time past we have been listening with 
wondering hearts to scholars of the materialistic 
school who have explained the stupendous occur- 
rences in the physical world by certain immutable 
mechanical laws, such as type, environment, selec- 
tion, and classification. And certain priests of 
God's house, fascinated by this new learning, have 
come into the sanctuary with this gospel : that 
spiritual law is only the natural projected into the 
realm of souls. Just ' as fire results from carbon 
brought into union with oxygen at a given tempera- 
ture, so mentality and spirituality are mechanical 



106 The Living Word. 

resultants of certain antecedents, such as birth and 
circumstance. To be holy, we must be born of good 
blood and be bred in the authorized ceremonies. 
That is only the modern way of putting the old Jew- 
ish contention, born of the flesh and of water. But 
we are glad to know that the more recent philosophy 
has vacated this notion of a self-running, self-exe- 
cuting Nature. It is pronounced a fiction of un- 
clear and superficial thinking. Nature is the out- 
come of law and purpose. Its phenomena are un- 
explained and inexplainable except by the presence 
of an infinite wisdom and will. But whatever 
metaphysical philosophy may have to say, for us 
who are unable to explore that realm, the voice of 
history is clear and unmistakable. Many a man, 
born of royal blood and bred in a palace, has been 
most ignoble. Fools have been born of scholars, 
and trained amid books. On the other hand, many 
of the most imperial intellects and master forces of 
the world have come from the most unpromising 
environment. Give us, if you can, the ancestry of 
Lincoln, Grant, Cromwell, Garibaldi. Whence came 
the apostles and the prophets and the greatest 
of the reformers? Out of Nazareth came the 
greatest of the sons of women. Spirituality is vital 
and original. It is a flame kindled by the fire from 
above. 



The Inward Real. 107 

II. The outward Jew is oxe whose tempee is 
his Church^ and the minute observance of its 
service is his religion. The inward Jew is one 
who can not be bound by temple walls, nor Eis 
duty be circumscribed by fixed forms. His life 
is in the truth that is symbolized rather than in 
the symbol. 

1. Mark the difference. The outward Jew, 
clothed in the garments of sanctity, mounts the steps 
of the splendid porch of the temple. He passes 
between the massive columns of brass, with their 
chapiters of network, lily-work, and pomegranates. 
They mean to him "beauty" and "strength." But 
beautiful architecture does not make a beautiful 
church. Hear what God said to Solomon who built 
the temple : "But if ye shall at all turn from fol- 
lowing me, ye or your children, and will not keep 
my commandments and my statutes which I have 
set before you, but go and serve other gods, and 
worship them: then will I cut off Israel out of the 
land which I have given them ; and this house which 
I have hallowed for my name, will I cast out of my 
sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a by-word 
among all people : and at this house, which is high, 
every one that passeth by it shall be astonished, and 
shall hiss; and they shall say, Why hath the Lord 



108 The Living Word. 

done thus unto this land, and to this house?" 
(i Kings ix, 6-8.) 

There stands the great altar. The outward Jew 
brings his heifers and turtle-doves, and offers them 
as sacrifices unto God, and believes that his sins 
are thereby covered. Hear God again: "To what 
purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me ? 
saith the Lord: I am full of burnt offerings of 
rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not 
in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he- 
goats. . . . Bring no more vain oblations : in- 
cense is an abomination unto me; the new-moons 
and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I can not 
away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meet- 
ing. . . . When ye spread forth your hands, 
I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye 
make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands 
are full of blood. Wash ye, make you clean: put 
away the evil of your doings from before mine 
eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judg- 
ment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, 
plead for the widow." (Isa. i, II, sq.) 

The inward Jew sees the truth underlying the 
offering. All things are God's, of which this gift 
is only the pledge. By God's gift alone can sins 
be washed away. 



The Inward Real. 109 

2. / have no purpose to combat the doctrine of 
symbolism. To do so is to combat the very scheme 
of God. In the temple every object was a symbol. 
Every column, every stone hewn or unhewn, every 
apartment, every implement, was fashioned after a 
pattern which God showed Closes in the holy mount. 
Everything there was holy. 

Symbols attract the eye and awaken the thought, 
and are effective in uplifting the soul to the Divine 
Eternal. But there is a double danger in symbolism. 
First, to limit sacred things to the prescribed forms. 
Our temptation is to take only those that have been 
specified and consecrated as imaging authoritatively 
Divine meanings. God's symbols are not confined 
to the temple. Everything is a symbol. Flowers, 
rocks, mountains, stars, everything in nature, by 
the Divine intent, shows out somewhat of the eter- 
nal excellent. 

Think you that the golden candlestick is the only 
holy lamp ? You would not care to light a gaming- 
table with it. That would be sacrilege indeed. But 
let me tell you that the lamp on your table, the 
lights in your office, are as truly symbolic of the 
searching eye of the Holy One or your personal 
influence as the lamp in the temple. 

Artists used to paint holy pictures, — Madonnas 



no The Living Word. 

with their feet on the crescent and a star on their 
brow; crucifixes, aureolas, and other sacred things. 
Just as holy scenes are painted by modern artists, 
though not in the same way. Millet's "Angelus" 
is as holy as Giotto's angels. The modern critic 
does not overdo it when he says that, "In the 
Angelus, the perfume of the blossom exhales from 
the dust; the rich color of the rainbow is revealed 
in the clod; and more than the splendor of kings 
is suggested in the pathos of the peasants." Josef 
Isaak's "Holy Family" is a common Dutch interior. 
Happy for us when every clerk will see a holy 
symbolism in his ink and pen; when every farmer 
will read righteousness in his plow and yoke; when 
the loom and the hammer, and every implement 
of toil, will be regarded as just as holy and sug- 
gestive as the pot of manna or the ark of the 
covenant. 

A second peril of symbolism is the deification 
of the form. Frederick W. Robertson, in one of 
his Tyrolese letters, describes a painting which he 
saw in Munich, representing a priest and a boy 
attacked by brigands. The priest holds up to their 
gaze the host, while the boy lifts a lamp to let the 
light fall upon it. The robbers cower down and 
relax their grasp upon their victims, awed by the 



The; Inward Real. hi 

mysterious symbols of religion. This is called the 
triumph of faith. But Robertson, with his keener 
perception of spiritual verities, says : "I do not 
call that faith; it is paltry, abject cowardice. There 
are men who would rob and murder; but because 
a mystery is held before them which may strike 
them dead, they tremble and give up the enterprise." 

Symbolism is good in so far as it opens to us the 
Divine real ; but when the symbol itself is taken for 
the real, it is a superstition. It is idolatry. 

The artist deplores the wreck of such beautiful 
structures as Melrose Abbey. But there was more 
of stalwart faith — aye, of reverence itself — in those 
old Scottish iconoclasts who would shatter the 
shackles from the minds of their countrymen, than 
there was in the most slavish devotee who would 
kiss the sacred relics there. Truth, purity, good- 
ness, are infinitely holier things than altars, incense, 
and sacraments. The inward fr, the outward is 
not, real. 

III. The: outward Jew is one of pattern; the 
inward is one OF life. The one is mechanical ; 
the other is living and expanding. 
I use the word pattern because it expresses ex- 
actly what I wish to say. The original meaning of 



ii2 The Living Word. 

the word is an inanimate master to guide the work- 
men. It is something cut out, a shape to be copied. 
If accurately copied, every product will be exactly 
like the original. 

Life never does that. As in the leaves of the 
forest, while retaining its essential nature, life pro- 
duces an endless variety of form. It never exactly 
reproduces what it once made. And what is true 
in all the lower forms of life, is infinitely more 
varied in all the higher and more complex forms. 

See the pattern Jew. He rises early in the morn- 
ing, goes out to the corner of the street, and there 
stands praying. He does so, not because he would 
have chosen that method of prayer, but because that 
is the way good men have done before. He comes 
from the market-place at noon, rolls up his sleeves, 
and washes his hands. There is no need of his 
doing so; but that is what holy men always have 
done, and he wants to be holy too. Occasionally 
he takes a bowl of water and a hyssop branch, and 
sprinkles the walls of his house, his clothing, and 
furniture. He does it because he wishes to have a 
holy home. It does not occur to him that to make 
a holy home he must be patient, and gentle, and 
reverent, and cultivate the inward virtues; but, 
imitating the fathers, he would purify his home by 



The; Inward Rem,. 113 

ceremonial sprinkling. A neighbor has lost a 
friend. It is a trial for him to do so, but he must 
follow the copy. So he goes to the house of mourn- 
ing, throws off his sandals at the door, enters the 
room, seats himself upon the floor, sprinkles ashes 
on his head, wraps sackcloth about his shoulders, 
and wails as if suffering. He has all the ancient 
form, but lacks the reality of a mourner. His gar- 
ments fit the pattern, and he thinks himself holy. 
This external conventionalism may deceive others 
and even ourselves. Ecclesiastical proprieties, the 
venerated speech of the saints, the songs of the holy 
men of old, the voice and gesture of sanctity, will do 
for us what cosmetics, rouge, the pencil, may do for 
a plain face, — give it a glow of beauty which, at 
a distance, is easily mistaken for the loveliness of 
genuine nature. 

It is even more difficult to distinguish the strict 
formalist from the genuine saint. But there is one 
point of nature which I have just named which is 
unmistakable. With the same glowing life, it will 
never be exactly like any of the former products. 
There is an individualism in the spiritual life which 
makes each particular star shine with a glory all 
its own. See the formalist with his gifts. They 
are measured by a rule of arithmetic. Holy charity 
8 



ii4 The Living Word. 

goes by machinery. That is the way Judas would 
do it ; and while he exactly calculates how far money 
will go toward feeding the poor, he can plan to sell 
his Lord. But Mary, ignoring all precedents and 
impelled by the might of her love, does a new thing, 
which proves to be better than she knew. There 
is no rule of righteousness so safe as ardent love 
for Jesus. 

Our charities, done by a mechanical rule, are 
often as cruel as a thrust with a goad. But charity 
impelled by genuine love is as fragrant as a rose. 
I read the other day a story of Amard Bucher, the 
world-renowned violinist. On the steps of a public 
building in Florence, an old, disabled soldier sat 
playing a violin. By his side stood a faithful dog 
holding in his mouth the veteran's hat, into which, 
now and then, a passer-by would drop a coin. A 
gentleman, in passing, paused, and asked for the 
violin; first tuning it, he then began to play. The 
sight of a well-dressed man, playing a violin in such 
a place, and with such associations, attracted the 
passers-by, and they stopped. The music was so 
charming that they stood enchanted. The number, 
of contributions largely increased. The hat became 
so heavy that the dog began to growl. It was 
emptied, and soon filled again. The company grew 



The Inward Real. 1x5 

until a great congregation was gathered. The per- 
former played one of the national airs, handed the 
violin back to its owner, and quickly retired. 

There we have the originality of genuine life. 
The formalist would have given his coin, and left 
with the feeling "I have done my duty." Bucher 
did not give a penny, but he broke an alabaster 
box for the poor old beggar, and so poured the 
precious ointment on the head of his Lord. And 
how the odor sweetened the lives of the many who 
witnessed the act! 

There are many who think their lives are stu- 
pidly dull ; and the dullest thing of all is their re- 
ligion. It need not be so. Every man's life may 
be as rich as a romance, as sweet as a symphony; 
but the secret is to be found first and chiefly in the 
inward real. 

" The poem hangs on the berry bush, 
When comes the poet's eye, 
And the street is one long masquerade 
When Shakespeare passes by." 

It is much more easy to criticise the inward 
Jew than the outward; for the simple reason that 
the one is always thinking of the rule by which we 
measure men, while the other ignores it. 

Have you ever seen a brigade of soldiers on 



n6 The: Living Word. 

dress parade? Everything was just right there. 
The equipments were all polished and glittering. 
The motions were regular and exact. They may 
have had a fight, but it was a sham fight, a parody 
of the real. Everything was in order, done by rule. 
Measured by Hardee's tactics, they were beyond 
criticism. But some of you have seen a real fight. 
How was it then? In the smoke and thunder of 
the battle, did you care how bright your buttons 
were polished? Did you think whether your coat 
was dusty or torn? Do you remember how you 
held your head or moved your feet ? Ah ! you were 
an inward soldier then; your heart and brain were 
at work. You forgot the pattern. 

Much fault is found with the men who do not 
conform to the rule. But how about the life ? There 
is many a well-rounded pattern Christian, so 
smooth that the rain will roll off him as from the 
wall of a sepulcher; but the within is full of dead 
men's bones and all uncleanness. There is many 
a man covered with scars from head to foot. He 
has stone bruises all over him, which he has re- 
ceived from the conventional morality and the 
harsh judgments of men. His has been a fearful 
inward conflict, which has started germs of life 
and wrung from him cries for help from God. Such 



The Inward Real. 117 

were Peter, Paul, Luther, Wesley, and many an- 
other. When the outward scars have all healed 
over by the process of spiritual granulation from 
within, they will be as pure as the angels. 

IV. Personal application oe the principles we 

HAVE REVIEWED. 

1. He who cultivates the inward, cultivates the 
Divine original in which he was made. He is him- 
self, and not a copy of some one else. As the stars 
in glory, God made human souls all different. But 
conventional life would spoil this diversity by 
crowding us all in a fixed mold. It would have us 
all dress alike, and talk alike, and act alike, and 
think alike. Modern culture threatens the ruin of 
individuality. But it need not, if we keep in mind 
the true relation of the outward to the inward. 
True culture is finished selfhood. 

2. He whose ideal is the outward, prevents 
growth. He who aspires for the inward, is ever 
progressing. The Scriptures teach that, for those 
who come into the life of Christ, everything is new ; 
and that that newness is continuously unfolding into 
something newer still. There is the new man: "A 
new creature in Christ Jesus." (2 Cor. v, 17.) 
There is a new life: "To live in newness of life." 



n8 The Living [Word. 

(Rom. vi, 4.) There is a continuously new career: 
"All things new." (Rev. xxi, 5.) There is a new 
world: "All things have become new." (2 Cor. 
v, 17.) There is a new destiny: "New Jerusalem." 
(Rev. xxi, 2.) 

3. He zvho has the inward comes into liberty. 
There are many who revolt from the religious life 
as from a tyranny. It is a constant restraint, all 
law: "Thou shalt not," and "Thou shalt." To 
them I would say that if your religion is purely 
an externalism, you are right. Nothing can be 
more slavish to an unholy man than the law of 
holiness. It is just so in respect to the law of the 
State. The man who wants to steal will feel the 
tyranny of the law against theft. The wretch who 
went the way of infamy at Auburn protested against 
the iniquity of a government which would murder 
him for murdering the President. But the man who 
has no theft or murder in his heart, sees a holy 
order in law, and adores it. To him it is a royal 
law of liberty. So in the realm of art. Give the 
student the correct rule by which excellence is ex- 
pressed, and if he has not the thing in his soul, 
the rule is oppressive. In poetry, how the student 
groans over trochees and spondees, dactyls and peri- 
dactyls, strophes and antistrophes. And when he 






The: Inward Rkai,. 119 

writes poetry, it has the resonance of lead. But it 
is not so when the poetry is in his soul. Then his 
song rolls out like that of the bird, joyously. It 
is just so in our moral life. That man is free who 
comes into a mighty love of the right. The mo- 
ment his heart is right, so that he knows and loves 
the will of God, for him "there is no law." 

4. To cultivate the inward is to cultivate the 
eternal. The pattern passes away; but the life it 
enshrines, endures forever. For example, the ex- 
ternalist says : "Go to church twice on the Lord's- 
day. More is needless, less is sin." "No," says the 
inward Jew, "be reverent always; worship Him 
whether in this mountain or that. The time and 
place are temporary incidents, not enduring essen- 
tials." 

Now the years are rolling by. In the great con- 
flagration, which must soon consume all material 
things, temple walls will crumble. Gerizim, Jeru- 
salem, and every holy mount will melt away. We 
enter upon that deep world where there are no 
churches. How about your rule, "Go to church 
twice," etc. ? If that is all your worship, you are 
poor indeed. But he who has cultivated the inward 
reverence, the spirit of worship, has entered into the 
temple not made with hands. He has the Eternal. 



VII. 

UNACHIEVED IDEALS. 

"Trophimits have I left at Miletum, sick! 3 — 2 Tim. 
iv, 20. 

Very little is known of Trophimus; but what 
we do know is all to his credit. He certainly was a 
man of parts, else the great apostle would not have 
chosen him for a colleague in one of his missionary 
journeys. 

He was not a Jew, but a Hellenist. He was born 
at Ephesus, and was reared in the worship of Di- 
ana, the presiding divinity of that illustrious city. 
But while a young man he accepted Christ, and be- 
came a most ardent aspirant for a holy and useful 
life. I can readily imagine how that, in the glowing 
love of his new life and with his poetic Greek tem- 
perament, he builded splendid schemes of wide use- 
fulness. He had before him such conspicuous ex- 
amples as Barnabas and Silas, Timothy and Titus. 
Why could he not he one of that goodly company? 

120 



Unachieved Ideals. 121 

For that he hoped, and planned, and prayed; and 
at last the opportunity came. 

Paul recognized his consecration, called him into 
his service, and permitted him to share with him the 
toil and sacrifice of his journeys. How Trophimus's 
heart must have burned within him when he found 
himself in the daily companionship of this master 
mind of all time ! Now the way is clear for him 
to do some worthy thing for God and his kingdom 
in the world. 

But the reality disappointed the dream of his 
consecration. About the only thing he did that is 
considered worthy of record is, that he was set to 
collecting money from the Gentile Christians to 
carry to their poor Hebrew brethren in the Jerusa- 
lem Church. Possibly also he, with Titus, carried 
the Second Epistle of Paul to the Church at Corinth. 

He who was so zealous effectively to aid the 
peerless apostle w r as really the innocent cause of 
his arrest and imprisonment. It was his presence 
at Jerusalem that gave rise to the report that Paul 
had taken a Gentile into the temple; and that 
brought on the tumult that resulted in the apostle's 
imprisonment and his ultimate trial at Rome. Poor 
Trophimus meant just right ; but calamity came of it. 

Then later, when Paul was going to Rome and, 



122 The: Living Word. 

as it proved, to his death, Trophimus traveled with 
him, glad if permitted to do so, to minister to him 
to the last. But he got no farther than Miletus. 
There he fell sick, and Paul was compelled to 
leave him. Theft this man's star sank under the 
horizon, and never appears again. 

What a prosy reality to answer his glittering 
ideal ! If he only had been permitted to share in 
Paul's dungeon, it would have been far more en- 
durable. With the passion of a martyr, it would 
have been much easier for him to languish in chains 
for Christ with the sympathy of the whole Christian 
world turning toward him, than to lie on a sick bed 
forgotten by everybody but his nurse. O, it would 
have been a thing sublime to walk to the stake or to 
bow under the headsman's ax! But how tame 
to have lingered an invalid for years, and then die 
bolstered up on pillows, with a physic bottle to his 
lips! That brief history is a truthful picture of 
most of us. The marble palace of our dream is only 
a common hut in the reality. The brilliant prince 
of our fancy is only an ordinary laborer. 

I read the other day an old New England legend. 
In the early period of the colony a ship was sent out 
from one of its ports, but never reached its desti- 
nation. One pleasant summer afternoon, so runs 



Unachieved Ideals. 123 

the story, the people were standing by the sea, and 
they saw a vessel approach the shore, which they 
knew, by its build and rigging, to be the missing 
ship. It drew nearer and nearer till every line was 
clearly visible ; and they even recognized the faces 
of those on board. "Then suddenly the vision faded, 
the sails dissolved in cloud, the spars were lost in 
the mist-lines of the sky, the hull disappeared be- 
neath the waters, the specter bark was no more." 
That legend has stood as the image of disappointed 
worldly ambitions. But it also images many a holy 
purpose. Our ideals started out actual ships, 
manned and equipped, but have dissolved in mists. 
There is many a Trophimus among us to-day, 
who, because of personal infirmity or some equally 
mean thing, not his sin, lies in despair, looking upon 
the utter desolation of his holiest schemes. We 
have a message for such, not to deepen their hu- 
miliation, but if possible to lift them completely 
out of it. 

I. Your unachieved ideal is a mark of the 

LOFTINESS OF THE SOUL THAT CONCEIVED IT. 

Though it never came to the actual, it is not a 
vain thing that it arose; for you are a nobler man 
for having it. 



124 The Living Word. 

Do you know whence that vision came ? It came 
out of the very sublimity of your being. It is the 
outcropping metal which tells how rich is the moun- 
tain that has seemed so poor. That largeness of 
love that conceived a generous gift that you wanted 
to make, but could not because of your poverty, — 
it was the love of Christ that enlarged your heart. 
That scheme of yours that overlooked the years 
which you will not live to achieve, — it was the 
power of an endless life that evoked it. That 
heavenly beauty with which you would remove some 
of the ugly places of this world, — it was the actual 
bloom of heaven in you. So far as you can see, 
the world is no better for your scheme, but you are. 
All that you have dreamed has gone into the mak- 
ing of your eternal being, and you will see it by 
and by. 

Our temptation is to measure our inward self 
by what we put in the outward, in our speech, in 
our song, in our deed. That is the way we measure 
others, and we unwittingly put the same measure- 
ment on ourselves. Undoubtedly there is need that 
we test ourselves frequently in that way, else we 
fall into the mistake of substituting our dream, 
that we can not realize, for the commonplace thing 
that we could do. We have recently read of a man 



Unachieved Ideals. 125 

who, seeing a thirsty pilgrim approaching, thought, 
"O, if I only could, I would give him a goblet of 
crystal filled with the juice of the grapes of Esh- 
col !" But in his inability to do the splendid thing, 
he failed to give him a cup of water, and lost the 
"disciple's reward." The sin of the man of "one 
talent" was not his abuse of his gift, but his failure 
to use it at all. The man who does not do the 
simple thing that he can do, will not do the splendid 
thing he thinks he would like to do. But there are 
those who would do the fine thing, if they could; 
and it is of those we affirm that their lofty ideal is 
the measure of their worth. 

Our outward limitations do not prove a corre- 
sponding littleness of being. Moses was slow of 
speech, yet was immeasurably taller than the elo- 
quent Aaron. Beethoven could not hear, and the 
conflict between his genius and his infirmity almost 
drove this deaf Apollo with his lyre to the desper- 
ation of suicide. But what a creator was he! 
Goethe's saying that "our wishes are presentiments 
of the capabilities that lie within us, and harbingers 
of that which we shall be in a condition to perform," 
may be oversanguine ; nevertheless, there is far 
more truth in it than we who lie on the ruins of 
our presentiments can believe. 



126 The Living Word. 

All of us have felt at times that there Is abso- 
lutely nothing that has been done by others but we 
too, if similarly environed, could do as well. We 
certainly find it easy to identify ourselves with the 
greatest heroes and heroines of history and ro- 
mance. The loftiest poets seem to sing for us, not 
new songs, but old ones which had been making 
melody in our soul, but which we had not been 
able to sing out for others ; the reason being our 
external and accidental deficiencies. How often 
have w T e thought, "My harp holds as rich music as 
the best, but I have not been taught to finger it. 
I could have been as great a soldier as our nation's 
hero, only my necessities made me a clerk. I might 
have been a cardinal, only for an inherited disease." 

Just as great Nature breathes into even' lily 
bulb, and makes it throb with a passion for the per- 
fect flower, each particular bulb pulsing with the 
confidence of all that lily bulbs have ever done 
or been, so we, in breathing the common life of 
the race, feel the whole, and are conscious of a 
capacity for the finest the race has produced. But 
only a small proportion of lily bulbs are able to re- 
alize their dream. Some are neglected by the florist, 
and so come to naught. Others are eaten by worms ; 
the drought famishes others ; the ambition of others 



Unachieved Ideals. 127 

is trodden out under the foot of a careless child. 

the careless florist, the worms, the droughts, the 
cruel feet that crush the soul's sweet dream! 

But these things can not destroy the soul's real 
nobility. They may indeed turn us to a better service 
than in the way we had planned. 

I know a beautiful girl, whose features are as 
finely cut as a Grecian cameo, who has the form 
and bearing of a queen, and the ambition of a Lady 
Macbeth : but she is a factory girl, and lives in a 
humble cottage on a street black with soot. On 
one occasion, when a splendid equipage passed, 
carrying an elegantly-dressed but a plain-featured 
young woman of about her age, she said, "O, I 
would make a better duchess than you!" Possibly 
she was right; but she never can be a duchess, and 
it is all in vain for her to wreck her happiness with 
useless repining. How much better for her to re- 
solve that, while not a duchess in name, she will be 
one in reality. Let her take the lofty spirit into the 
factory and home, and there be noble and imperial. 

1 do not know much about duchesses, excepting as 
I have seen them in history and romance. But I 
have come to think of them as quite like the rest of 
us, very human. And it is quite possible that the 
only difference between the titled one and the fac- 



128 The Living Word. 

tory girl is the difference of circumstance. Surely 
the place is not the sovereign. If it be, then the 
soul is slavish rather than princely. 

Let us believe in our spirit's intuition, and assert 
our sovereign might wherever we are. A princely 
spirit can convert a cottage into a palace, and a fac- 
tory into a field of glory. 

" Iyive your own life as conscience moves, 
And heart and brain define you, 
Resolved to fill alone the grooves 

Your attributes assign you ; 
Not heeding much, if self approves, 
If all the world malign you. 

Be brave in purpose, strong in act, 

As you and Truth decide it, 
Swift in defense, slow in attack, 

Then what the issue, 'bide it. 
And learn what long the wise have known, 

Self-flight alone can hurt you." 

II. God accepts the unaccomplished thing you 

PURPOSED, AS A THING ACTUARY DONE. 

I knew a little girl whose parents moved from 
the city into a country village, where they had 
spacious grounds. The child asked for a little piece 
for a garden all her own. She wanted to grow some 
roses to make papa and mamma happy. All by her- 
self she dug the earth and planted the roots. She 
watered and weeded the bed, and watched anxiously 



Unachieved Ideals. 129 

the growth of the plants. But in her inexperience, 
she did not do her work well, and the roses never 
bloomed. The dear girl's heart was broken when 
she saw roses blooming elsewhere, and none on 
the plants she had cultivated so lovingly. I well 
remember how the hearts of the parents went out 
for the child; and how they took the loving pur- 
pose for the flowers themselves. And her love was 
all the more precious, just because of the failure of 
its project. Brothers, your Father knows what you 
meant; and the love that answers your purpose is 
as full as if you laid the actual at his feet. 

If we could only see as God sees we would be 
elated by our companionships. Heroes and heroines, 
princes and priests, prophets and apostles, are all 
about us, in our community, our Church, our home. 
We are frequently surprised by some heroic deed 
done by some one whom we have met every day; 
only we had never suspected what a man he was. 
Nor did he dream it himself. Not long ago one of 
our sailing vessels had suffered a bad break below 
the water line, and the pumps were not enough to 
save the ship from sinking. Every effort was made 
to close the break; but in vain. All seemed hope- 
lessly lost, when a common deck-hand asked them 
to give him some bagging and let him down to the 
9 



130 The Living Word. 

fracture. He never came back. Nor was it his 
purpose to do so. He deliberately corked himseif 
in the hole, and thus prevented the rush of water 
into the ship. No one had ever thought of making 
that deck-hand a member of the Legion of Honor. 
Though unrecognized, his was a heart mighty with 
the heroism of the cross. 

The woodcutters with Lincoln in the Kentucky 
forests, never suspected that they were working by 
the side of the tallest spirit of the century. We are 
jostling up against heroes every day, only we do 
not recognize them. More difficult still is it for us 
to recognize the sublime in ourselves. Dr. Watkin- 
son speaks of the unconsciousness of genius, and 
cites Columbus, who never knew that he discov- 
ered America; and Franklin, who never dreamed 
that his kite was to be a sign in the heavens, be- 
tokening a new age. What would Raphael have 
thought if he had only forseen that one of the poor- 
est of his paintings would sell for half a million dol- 
lars? Egotism is never great; at least not in that 
particular in which it is egotistic. Men usually 
boast of that in which they are not especially skill- 
ful. Genuine strength is commonly unaware of its 
strength. Goethe was childishly vain of his theory 



Unachieved Ideals. 131 

of colors and his botanical studies, and believed 
that his name would be remembered in the world 
because of these, when his "Faust" was forgotten. 
Leonardo da Vinci was prouder of his flying ma- 
chine than he was of his immortal "Brera." Sir 
Walter Scott prized his title as a Scottish lord higher 
far than he did his "Waverly." Milton believed that 
his fame would rest secure on his "Areopagitica." 

We commonly make our measurement of things 
and men by the false standard of bulk, success, and 
the loudness of their report in the world. Carnegie's 
name is graven on tablets of brass, and universities 
place literary titles on a commercial man. But the 
name of the widow with her mite is not sounded by 
fame's golden trump. Yet that timid woman is, by 
Christ's measurement, incalculably a greater per- 
sonality than the multimillionaire. Rome's crown 
received the plaudits of the world. But how in the 
roll of the ages does it compare with the crown 
of thorns? 

We can readily believe in the greatness of those 
whose biographies we read and whose monuments 
adorn our parks. But let us rest assured that what 
we believe of them may be equally true of the least 
of us who have not had their success, but who have 



132 The Living Word. 

meant as well. The world will not regard our fail- 
ures; but God sees the real nobility in and behind 
all sincere effort. We can believe with Tennyson,— : 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete ; 

That not a worm is cloven in vain ; 

That not a moth with vain desire 

Is shriveled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain." 

III. The failure oe our ideals,, our holy aims, 
under God's Providence, only helps them on. 
It is a well-known fact that few men can stand 
the test of great successes, even in God's own work. 
How many ministers can we name w T ho were won- 
derfully useful in upbuilding the Church, till by their 
very successes they became elated, and turned their 
very power to harm the flock of God ! How many 
there are who, when in moderate circumstances, 
were generous, humble, and kind, but when they 
were prosperous, lost their generosity, and became 
tyrannous ! 

Paul himself, when hindered, as he thought, by 
his infirmity, besought God to remove it. But the 
"messenger of Satan" was not removed, and the 



Unachieved Ideaes. 133 

very humiliation it brought, enlarged the useful- 
ness of the apostle. The infirmity of noble minds is 
ambition ; and were it not for the miserable thorn, 
the probability is that Paul would have given more 
of himself and less of Christ to the world. He would 
have been "exalted above measure," and his name 
would have shadowed that of his Lord. 

Many of us have found ourselves with our hands 
tied, and have wondered why the omnipotent Fa- 
ther did not release us. The answer is here ; we do 
more for him in our bondage than we possibly could 
if we were at liberty. Dr. William M. Taylor tells 
a very suggestive story of the celebrated scientist, 
Morse. He says that one day Morse went into the 
studio of the artist, Benjamin West, with whom he 
was a great favorite. West was then engaged upon 
his famous picture of "Christ Rejected/' and, after 
carefully examining his visitor's hands, said to him. 
"Let me tie you with this cord, and place you there, 
while I paint the hands of the Savior." So he stood 
still until the work was done, bound as it were in 
Christ's stead. 

O what a privilege it was, even in that way, to 
represent his Lord ! - But he was, after all, only a 
dummy. But you — tied down by infirmities, re- 
strained by circumstances, compelled, like Trophi- 



134 The: Living Word. 

mus, by some mean thing to linger in obscurity and 
humiliation, while others with whom you started, 
move on to large usefulness, and possibly to the 
glory of martyrdom — you are really standing with 
Christ bound. "Here is the patience and faith of 
the saints." And God keeps you there for the very 
purpose of enlarging your being, and really of your 
usefulness. In God's "All Saints' Day" the unknown 
appear. Lowell words a divine fact thus : 

" One feast, of holy days the crest, 

I, though no Churchman, love to keep,— 
All Saints, — the unknown good that rest 

In God's still memory folded deep ; 
The bravely dumb that did their deed, 

And scorn to blot it with a name ; 
Men of the plain heroic breed, 

That loved heaven's silence more than fame." 



VIII. 
THE CHURCH AT EPHESUS. 

"Unto the angel of the Church of Ephesus write; 
These things saith he that holdeth the seven 
stars in his right hand, who walketh in the 
midst of the seven golden candlesticks; I 
know thy works, and thy labor, and thy pa- 
tience, and how thou canst not bear them which 
are evil: and thou hast tried them which 
say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found 
them liars: and hast borne, and hast patience, and 
for my name's sake hast labored, and hast not 
fainted. Nevertheless I have somewhat against 
thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Re- 
member therefore from whence thou art fallen, 
and repent, and do the first works; or else I will- 
come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy 
candlestick out of his place, except thou repent. 
— Rev. ii, 1-5. 

The: history of the Church at Ephesus is full of 
vital meanings for the Church of to-day. Because 

i35 



13 6 The: Living Word. 

of their practical value, let us study the three things 
mentioned in our text concerning that ancient 
Church. 

I. Its Exceeeencies. "I know thy works," etc. 
II. Its Defect. "I have somewhat against thee." 
III. The Means oe its Recovery. "Remember," 
etc. 

I. The Church at Ephesus was one oe the most 

FAVORED AND ONE OE THE MOST NOTED OE HIS- 
TORY. 

I. It originated in a little band of disciples of 
John the Baptist, through the efforts of those godly 
people, Aquila and Priscilla, who had come to the 
city in pursuit of their trade, but reckoned it to be 
their chief business to bear witness of the great sal- 
vation they had found in the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Its first preacher was the eloquent Apollos, a man 
"mighty in the Scriptures," who afterwards became 
one of the most famous men in the Church of Christ. 

It enjoyed the pastorate of Paul for three years, 
and ever after received his special care. While a 
prisoner at Rome, he wrote to it that magnificent 
epistle which Coleridge calls "the divinest compo- 
sition of man." 

For several years Timothy was its presiding 



The Church at Ephesus. 137 

bishop. It also became the great metropolitan 
Church, the center of Christian influence. The 
saintly John made it his home. There he did his 
best work; namely, the preparation of his "Gospel," 
and there he died. Never did a Church have a more 
brilliant beginning. Apollos, Paul, Timothy, and 
John, — these were the mighty men who laid the 
foundations of this celebrated Church. 

2. In addition to the character of its brilliant 
founders, there were other facts that helped this 
Church to greatness. Ephesus was the great com- 
mercial city of Asia Minor, as Corinth was of 
Greece. Ships from all parts of the mercantile 
world anchored in her river, the Caystrus. Mer- 
chants from Achaia, Macedonia, Syria, Rome, and 
lands far away, met here for purposes of trade. 
Xext to Rome, it was probably, at the time of Paul, 
the most cosmopolitan city in the world. 

We know how foreigners in a city of this char- 
acter will give attention to things, which in their 
native towns they would ignore. The spirit of free- 
dom dominates, and curiosity is alert. They, in their 
leisure hours, wish to see and hear all they can, 
and return to their native land with the wonderful 
tales. Men would listen with curiosity to Christian 
preaching at Ephesus, who at home would cry out 



138 The; Living Word. 

against it, "Heresy, Infidelity, Destroyers of the 
Gods." 

Paul saw at once that there was a grand oppor- 
tunity to make his influence felt in every land. 
Hence he wrote to the Corinthians who were plead- 
ing for him to come to them again : "I will tarry at 
Ephesus till Pentecost, for a great door and effec- 
tual is opened to me." While the world was com- 
ing to him with curious ears, it was not needful for 
him to tramp the world and force an unwilling hear- 
ing. Many a heathen heard the gospel at Ephesus, 
and returned to his home a glad witness of its power 
to save. And so, from the very nature of the case, 
Ephesus became a missionary center. 

Opportunities make obligations. The Ephesian 
Christians must needs send their light out in every 
direction, or their candlestick would be removed. 
Appeals for instruction in the new faith came to 
them from afar. If they had failed to respond, they 
would have suffered what has come to every other 
Church and individual who has refused to let 
his light shine; the flame would have been extin- 
guished. 

But Ephesus did respond to its obligations. It 
was one of the seven golden candlesticks. Many 
a Christian convert went out to Smyrna and Per- 



The Church at Ephesus. 139 

gamos, and all over Asia Minor as missionaries. 
They crossed into Macedonia, sailed over the great 
sea to Africa and to the coast of Italy, with the glad 
tidings of joy which shall be to all people. And 
their multiplying obligations only made them labor 
the more earnestly. The more one does, the more 
is laid on him to do. Duties never grow less in 
weight nor fewer in number. But with these Ephe- 
sian Christians, there was no burden too heavy for 
them, nor toil too protracted. Nor were they spas- 
modic, taking up a work for Christ with zeal and 
then speedily wearying of it. "I know thy works 
and thy labor, . . . and thy patience, . . . 
and thou hast not fainted." 

Nor was their work done for selfish motives. 
Some there are who do even their Christian work 
for personal reward. They are not always conscious 
of it ; but so often we meet with men who give their 
labor and money and prayers for the Church of 
Christ, and then expect applause. And when they 
fail to receive it, they fret and smart and finally 
withdraw from their work. "They have done it 
unto men." It is not godliness, but barter. Such, 
however, was not the fact at Ephesus. The Spirit 
says, "I know thy works; ... for my name's 
sake thou hast labored." 



140 The: Living Word. 

3. Another feature of the Ephesian Church 
brought out in these verses is, it was orthodox. 

The intellectual form of our religious faith, as 
well as our activity, is largely determined by our 
outward circumstances. The points in doctrine we 
most emphasize are those that antagonize the pre- 
vailing errors. Thus the great doctrine of the Refor- 
mation was, "Salvation is by faith," because the 
leading doctrinal error was, "Salvation is by works." 
The great point in the Wesleyan revival was religion 
is a conscious inner life, to antagonize the prevail- 
ing error that religion consisted in a round of ec- 
clesiastical observance. So the great doctrine of our 
Church in the early history of our country was, 
"Salvation is free," to antagonize the extreme Cal- 
vinism of the time. The loudest cry of Christian 
consciousness to-day is, "God is love," as against 
the excessive terror which characterized the preach- 
ing of the generation passing away. 

Now, Ephesus was the stronghold of heathen- 
dom and superstition. It contained one of the grand- 
est temples in the world ; a temple which took three 
hundred years to build, which Strabo calls one of 
the seven wonders of the world — the great temple 
of Diana. Christianity was brought in immediate 
conflict with this superstition right here at its most 



The Church at Ephesus. 141 

intense center. I will not delay to give particulars, 
but will simply say that here the Christian Church 
was compelled at once to shape its principles and 
assert them. Another thing that aided in their or- 
thodoxy was the great corruptors of the faith, who 
professed the name of Christ, came to Ephesus — 
those who claimed to be apostles, and those who, 
like the Xicolaitans, in Jesus' name, justified abom- 
inable things. The Church set itself to sifting. It 
hated heresy, and wherever it found evil in doc- 
trine, cast it out. "I know that thou canst not bear 
them that are evil : and thou hast tried them that 
say they are apostles and are not, and hast found 
them liars. And thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolai- 
tans, wdiich I also hate." 

Here, then, we have a Church apostolic in its 
origin, correct in its principles, unselfish in its pur- 
poses, abundant in its labors, persevering, strong, 
one of the brightest of the seven golden candle- 
sticks. Who of us would not say that it was a glo- 
rious Church? 

But let us hear what the Spirit saith to this 
Church, and through it to the entire Church that 
exhibits a similar character : "Nevertheless I have 
somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy 
first love." 



142 The Living Word. 

II. The defect of the Ephesian Church : The 

LOSS OF FIRST LOVE. 

By this loss of first love, I do not think is meant 
what we understand by a hopelessly backslidden 
state. The description we have given is by no 
means that of a backslidden people. Real back- 
sliders are proverbially worse than they were before 
conversion. (Matt, xii, 43-45.) The trouble with 
these Ephesians was not that they had left God, 
but that they had lost the fervency and power of 
their early love. Religion had ceased to be in them 
an inward affection as it was when they first began 
the religious life. As this is a very common expe- 
rience, let me name a few of the leading character- 
istics of a Christian's first love, the loss of which is 
so perilous. 

1. It is emotional. Men usually begin the divine 
life with a great deal of feeling. So far as they 
are able to interpret it, it is all feeling. A descrip- 
tion of early religious experience is a description of 
feelings. There is the dread sense of sin, the anxious 
foreboding, the sorrow of repentance, the troubled 
groping in the dark, the struggle within, the pitiful 
cry for help. There is a view of the cross and its 
bleeding victim. Then, whether faith comes slowly 
or suddenly, there is a breaking in of light upon the 



The: Church at Ephesus. 143 

soul with surprising revelation. Then there is a 
rush of joy, gratitude, peace, love. Sometimes it is 
overpowering: it laughs, sings, shouts. "When the 
Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were 
like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled 
with laughter and our tongue with singing." 

Say what we will, a leading feature of first love 
is emotion. To borrow the apostle's strong adjec- 
tive, it is "fervent;" that is, burning, hot, boiling. 
See the young Christian. How his face glows ! His 
eyes sparkle ; he is full of zeal, ready to do anything, 
to bear any cross. I think that our feelings lie 
closer to the divine side of our nature than any other 
part of our being. They are deeper than our 
thoughts, and are therefore first stirred by the move- 
ments of the Divine life. The emotional side of our 
being reaches out, like a promontory, far into the 
ocean of the Infinite, and is sensitive to the first 
pulsing of the mighty tide that takes its rise in the 
presence of God. Why is it that the chorus "Happy 
day, happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away," 
continues to be sung in revival times as it does, only 
that we remember that early day as remarkable for 
its happiness? 

But men say that it is not in the nature of things 
for that to last ; that feeling must develop into prin- 



144 The Living Word. 

ciple, emotion must yield to duty. But where can 
you find that in this great book ? It is indeed taught 
that there must be growth in principle ; but nowhere 
do we find that the glow and fervor of this first 
love must subside. 

Hear Paul: "I pray that your love may abound 
yet more and more in knowledge and m all judg- 
ment." Hear the Spirit to the Church at Laodicea : 
"So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither 
cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth." In 
I Thess. iii, I, we read, "The Lord make you to in- 
crease and abound in love." 

Let us not, then, delude ourselves into the belief 
that a mechanical performance of duty and an in- 
tellectual acceptance of the true doctrine is a safe 
substitute for the glow of genuine feeling. 

2. First love knows no bounds. There are no 
limits to its faith or courage or assurance. It claims 
and believes that it possesses, in one glorious mo- 
ment, what the ripe Christian has reached only after 
long years of consecration. 

" Of my Savior possessed, 
I was perfectly blessed, 
As if filled with the fullness of God." ' 

It is as extravagant as the life of Spring, which 
pours itself out in lavishness of blossom and color 



The Church at Ephesus. 145 

and fragrance, making promises impossible to ful- 
fill in a single season. Should a tree give perfect 
fruit for every blossom, it would exhaust its vitality 
and pay the penalty of its excess with its life. Yet 
that is the w r ay of fresh young life. 

It was just so that the new life came to the early 
Church, with the breath of Pentecost and miraculous 
powers, and daily conversions in astonishing num- 
bers. Multitudes, under the torrent rush of the new- 
creating Love, cast all their goods in a common treas- 
ury, and confidently expected the immediate coming 
of the Lord in glory; anticipating at once all that 
the Lord was preparing for them in the ages to 
come. 

And this we believe is the impulsion of every in- 
dividual when he comes mightily into the new life. 
His heart o'erleaps all processes, and is impatient 
for the finished thing. He gets in a hurry, and is 
surprised when he finds that neither older Christians 
whom he urges, nor sinners whom he calls, respond 
to his glowing enthusiasm. Beautiful it is, like the 
tree of life in blossom, and fills the earth atmos- 
phere with the sweetness of the eternal. The ideal 
glory throws its richness into the real. That is an 
unhappy hour in the history of a loving soul when, 
after being shocked by its many disappointments, 
10 



146 The Living Word. 

it suffers the decline of the extravagance of over- 
flowing first love. The apostolic counsel is not, "Let 
your love be suppressed by wisdom and prudence/' 
but, "Let it abound yet more and more!' 

If, when the apple-tree finds that only a minute 
proportion of its blossoms comes to the fruit, it 
should become disheartened and resolve to make no 
effort at all, it would soon be a lost tree. With the 
loss of its ideal, it is only a stick. It is high wis- 
dom rather than shallow sentiment for the bride 
and groom to keep perennial the ideals of their fresh 
young love, and strive to be true to them in spite of 
the many prose realities that thrust themselves into 
their history. Though never realized in fullness, 
they throw a sweetness and refinement into their 
lives that otherwise would be lost. Who can read the 
story of Charles Kingsley's chivalric passion for his 
wife and question the power of such a love ulti- 
mately to make a home actually as sublime as the 
ideal itself? Suppose it does not all come at once; 
when the story is finished it is all there, with not a 
blossom lost. On the stone beneath which husband 
and wife lie in Eversley Churchyard is this epitaph, 
"Amavimus, Amamus, Amamibus" 

If that be true in all the lower forms of life, it 
is supremely true in the higher forms. The Chris- 



The Church at Ephesus. 147 

tian must ever have before him the measure of the 
perfect man in Christ Jesus, and keep ever in his 
heart the ambition of immediate accomplishment, 
which is the ideal of first love. 

3. First love is creative. While it pulses, it can 
not be confined to fixed modes, but is ever finding 
some fresh mode of expression. In word, in deed, 
in song, it has an everlasting newness. Nothing is 
so transforming. When the love of God first filled 
our hearts, it not only changed them, but it changed 
the universe. The sun shone brighter; the firma- 
ment of night was a new thing ; the very face of the 
earth was renewed. It made present to our hearts 
what hereafter will be a fact before our eyes, "a 
new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth right- 
eousness." 

This is what the Ephesian Christians had lost, — 
the freshness and creative energy of the early love ; 
and so had settled down in the dull routine of correct 
dogma and morality, and the dead routine of fixed 
ceremonial. 

III. HOW CAN THIS LOST FIRST LOVE BE RECOVERED? 

By three things' : 

1. "Remember! 3 The temper of our age is just 
the reverse of this injunction. There are many who 



148 The Living Word. 

believe that the redemption of the race can be se- 
cured only by a complete disenthrallment from the 
ancient thought and habits. We are rapidly losing 
reverence for the past, and are rushing on to what 
we believe is a new and glorious future. In the fury 
of the rapids, we believe that to look back is to 
be lost. 

The spirit of the Church partakes of the tem- 
per of the times. There perhaps has never been an 
age since the candlestick was removed from Ephesus, 
when the Church was so intensely active as now. It 
is impatient of old methods and old theories, which 
it would cast off as rusty shackles. There is doubt- 
less much of genuine truth and life in these new 
movements ; but they have their peril, which can be 
averted only by habitual and careful retrospection. 

The elements that were the potent forces to cre- 
ate the splendors of the present hour, may be so 
submerged as entirely to escape our view; and for 
want of attention we forget them. Unless we pause 
to remember, it is the easiest thing imaginable to 
mistake the exhilaration of movement for life itself ; 
and only when our vessel lies helpless in the sluggish 
waters below the rapids, we discover that the fires in 
the furnace have gone out. 



The Church at Ephesus. 149 

It is a trite saying that the newest is the oldest. 
He who forgets the old, which is the eternal new, 
is sure to come into a moldy senility, as deadly as it 
is stupid. To avoid this perilous deterioration, the 
first thing to do is to "remember whence thou art 
fallen." 

2. "Repent." There is divine wisdom in this 
call. It does not send us to the use of artificial 
means to restore lost religious emotions. Many do 
that. When their love has grown cold, they seek 
to kindle it anew by resorting to rousing meetings, 
with sensational methods, and hottest exhortations, 
seeking through the physical sensibilities to effect 
an inward experience which is only a counterfeit of 
the first love. All feeling thus produced is excite- 
ment which will have a painful and disastrous re- 
action. Feeling will not be so easily roused the next 
time, and finally will cease to respond to our effort 
altogether. The thing to do is to repent. Come 
with your guilt to Him who will have compassion 
on the contrite of heart. Your place of relief is only 
at the penitent's altar. 

3. "Do thy first. works" The law has been often 
stated : feeling comes from acts done on principle. 
What are those "first works ?" They are repentance 



150 The Living Word. 

and faith. That is the way we received Christ at 
first. "As ye have received Christ Jesus the Lord, 
so walk ye in him." Begin at the beginning and 
continue there. Despair not. While you* continue 
in works of faith, the candle will burn anew. 



JAN 2 1904 



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